


When Light Grows Less

by loquaciousquark



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, F/M, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Romance, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-07-28
Packaged: 2017-12-15 16:15:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 48,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loquaciousquark/pseuds/loquaciousquark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke isn't a hero to everyone. Revenge comes calling, and Hawke and Fenris learn that there is more than one way to be helpless.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I know, I know, I said I wouldn't be writing any more longfic. And I didn't mean to, honest--I thought this was going to cap out much shorter than it did, but different themes cropped up than I expected and I felt like I had to see them through to the end. This fic also began life during an extremely stressful finals month, and as my coping mechanism for that stress is apparently to write the unhappiest things I can imagine, please be forewarned that this story is very dark and deals with extreme grief and despair (...as per usual, I suppose). I'm also playing with a few various formatting and chapter-length changes as a result, so please forgive any dust from my inexperienced construction.
> 
> Regardless, I hope you enjoy.
> 
>  **Warnings:** Explicit physical and emotional torture with permanent ramifications.

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;  
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:  
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run  
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.  
And I not help. Nor word now of success:  
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—  
Work which to see scarce so much as begun  
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.  
  
Or what is else? There is your world within.  
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.  
Your will is law in that small commonweal…

                -- _The Times are Nightfall_ , Gerard Manley Hopkins

when light grows less

 

\---

 

Part One

 

—

In the end, everything happens because of this:

Hawke opens the window.

It is a cool night and the house is overwarm, and she is overwarm, and so without a thought she undoes the latch of the tall window in her study that overlooks her patch of herb garden, and she leans out her head just for a moment to glance at the clouding sky. "Going to rain," she murmurs to herself, glad for the break in humidity the impending shower will bring, and turns back to the sofa. "I'm sorry. Please continue."

Fenris throws her a moody glare and turns the page with far more force than necessary. "I don't see why you continue to choose such nonsense for these evenings. A book of recipes would have more value."

"And if you think Orana would give you her cookbook for you to get your pointy claw-marks all over, Varric's got a thaig to sell you. Besides," she adds, grinning, "you can't _possibly_ think your education still takes precedence over my entertainment."

"Very little does, I've found," he says sourly.

 _That_ one stings. She had meant it as a joke, certain the months of the lessons they have worked through would prove the lie of it—but whether or not he means his acerbity, the sentiment is too close to the accusations he'd leveled at her one bitter night three years ago. Fenris lowers his eyes to the book again before the hurt shows on Hawke's face, and she turns swiftly to the bookcase beside the window to regain her composure, tugging a wrinkle from her short robe, curling her toes in her soft leather boots until the flush of embarrassment is gone. "Flames," she says eventually, proud of the steadiness in her voice, "you're in a mood tonight."

There is a long pause, and then Fenris sighs. "Forgive me," he says, and she can nearly _hear_ his eyebrows knotting together. "I was thinking of—never mind."

Hawke glances over her shoulder at him, but though Fenris meets her gaze easily he clearly has no inclination of discussing the subject further. "Suit yourself," Hawke says at last, shrugging, and finds herself rewarded with a brief but genuine smile as she turns back to the books. "So if you don't care for tubers, how would you feel about fairy tales?"

"Children's stories?"

He sounds almost as disgusted at the thought of them as the cookbook, but Hawke pulls the thick, leather-bound volume from the shelf and blows the dust from its spine. "You've got to at least _try_ it before you choke on your disdain, Fenris."

"I would be more willing had I not been caught by your treachery too many times before."

"Aveline thought the pamphlet would be very educational."

"It was a manual on how to care for a longsword. Apparently written for a _child._ "

"The sharp end is for sticking. It doesn't get much more practical than that."

" _Hawke._ "

She quirks an eyebrow but he is smiling again, amusement swallowing any rancor left in his voice. Hawke hefts the book in one hand, splays her other palm over the embossed title. " _Well_ , Serah Scorn, if you can't be arsed to polish your longsword correctly, perhaps you'll enjoy reading about evil uncles being spitted on them."

Fenris opens his mouth—

—and an arrow drives suddenly and precisely through the back of Hawke's spread left hand.

For a moment there is only silence. She stares at it where it bursts from her skin, uncomprehending, the long ash shaft trembling ever-so-slightly from the force of the blow, the pale yellow fletching stirred by her breath—and _then_ the pain comes, biting and bitter and _cold,_ and she bends over her hand with a choking gasp.

She cannot even pull it free. The head of the arrow jabs through the far side of the book, pinning her to the stories between its pages; a wild hysterical voice in the back of her head shouts _a gripping read!_ and _can't put the book down!_ and somewhere even behind that there is Fenris's voice shouting something, saying—her name—but the agony swells sharp and fast and drowns out all sounds but her heartbeat pounding hard in her ears, drumming loud as a rabbit's and as fast. Then she is on the ground, on her knees, and she cannot remember if she fell or if Fenris pushed her down—but the book is crookedly propped on the point of the arrow scratching into her hardwood floor and her own quick breaths are hot on the backs of her fingers—

" _Hawke!_ " snaps Fenris, and the sound of her name in his voice is enough to shake her from her stupor.

Get up—get _up!_ She's been shot before, and wounded far worse than this—Hawke grits her teeth and grips the shaft of the arrow with her other hand, cracking a whip-thin line of flame along the ash-wood arrow. It takes a moment to catch—too long—and then _finally_ it burns, orange flame licking down the smooth wood until it reaches the back of her hand. Two breaths more, a dozen heartbeats—and the shaft from skin to fletching is ash, fine and white and scattering as Hawke jerks her hand free with a curse.

But—there is something wrong with the ash. There is something wrong with her hand too, something deep and burning—but no time to worry about it, and clutching her wrist, Hawke spares only a glancing wish for her staff before she turns to the battle Fenris has waged behind her back.

Two armor-clad figures are already dead at the foot of the open window, an elf and a burly human woman in heavy plate, their armor marked on the left shoulder with a pale yellow half-moon. Even as Hawke darts forward Fenris drops a third man to join them, blood on his gauntlets and spattered across his face. Healing magic surges behind her eyes and roars down her arm to her wounded palm, but the skin is slow to respond and again she has that feeling that something is _wrong—_

"Behind!" Fenris shouts, and Hawke whirls on her heel as the door to the study splinters open. Three more armored men stand there, naked blades in hand, and more close behind; Hawke takes two quick steps and flings out her hand in an arc, reaching for ice—

Something _splits_ in her head—

And the thick spears of ice she'd called emerge as nothing more than a sudden gasp of white smoke.

For an instant she cannot breathe, stunned beyond words—she tries again, pulling violently on the Fade-gold twist of magic in her heart, and this time it gives her even less. One of the men in the doorway pushes forward, his sword lifted; a woman in a full-mask helmet darts under his arm with daggers in each hand, racing towards her like the Void itself snaps at her heels. Fenris is still somewhere behind her, fighting, the room ringing with steel on steel and the sharp cries of landed blows.

No magic—and _now_ she recognizes the heaviness of magebane in her blood, smells the acrid bite of its scent in the wound left by that first arrow. She should have known with the way the wood refused to catch—she should have _realized—_

Hawke falls back, then plants her good hand solidly on the arm of the sofa and vaults over the back of it. The high distant whine of a whistle is her only warning; she throws herself forward and another yellow-fletched arrow buries itself in an oak table standing by the door. Hawke spins to face her pursuers again, gropes behind her—she should have gone towards the fire, the _poker—_ but as the man with the sword advances her fingers close around the fat bottle of wine Fenris had brought her once as an offering of peace.

She sucks in a breath, staring into the man's impassive brown eyes—then she hurls the bottle forward with her whole strength. It catches him square in the face and shatters; wine spatters in a blood-red spray over the light sofa and he drops like a log, eyes wide and unseeing. The woman with the daggers leaps sideways to avoid the falling glass and tries to go around the sofa's far end, but Fenris is there to meet her, snarling, and though there are two more close at his back and he is bleeding from a deep cut to his forehead he does not hesitate as he drives his arm elbow deep through the woman's chest. She shrieks in agony and drops her daggers, wrapping her hands around his wrist as if in supplication—

And then, as suddenly as lightning strikes through spreading silver wires, every lyrium brand on his skin blows light at once.

Fenris's muscles tense iron-hard, ridged with pain; his head goes back like claws have dragged him by his hair to his toes, his spine arching under the agony. The woman in his grasp lets out a soft, sudden sigh and goes limp as his hand clenches involuntarily around her heart. Even dampened by magebane Hawke can feel the oily licking of blood magic on her skin, blood magic on _Fenris;_ it is an easy thing then to forget her own pain, to forget even the fresh warriors pushing through her open door. All that matter is Fenris, his mouth open, gasping—his spine twisting—his weight dropping to the floor, nerveless, boneless, every inch of his skin alight. Four steps—two—

And as the blood mage slips in through the open window, panting, grinning, a gloved hand fists hard in Hawke's hair, and a thin serrated blade comes to rest gently, point-first, over her heart.

"Stop," says the man holding her, but the word means nothing for how little attention she gives it. Fenris is on his back, eyes closed, lyrium still flickering with sporadic, unsteady light and she can't see if he's _breathing—_

"Let go," she snarls, and yanks hard on the wrist that bears the knife. "Maker _take_ you, you son of a bitch _—Fenris—_ "

He stirs at the sound of his name and for a moment Hawke's heart begins to beat again; then the blood mage kneels and wraps his hand around Fenris's throat in clear threat and Hawke jerks against the fingers fisted in her hair with a choked, inarticulate cry of frustration.

"He lives," says the man into her ear, cold and impatient, "as long as you cooperate. _Stop_."

Hawke tenses—but Fenris's eyes open, then, a sliver of dazed green behind the blood smearing over his forehead, and she forces herself to be still. "If you've come to rob the place," she says tightly, "you've picked the wrong house. There's nothing of value here."

He gives a short, unamused laugh and tightens his hand in her hair. "How little you know, Champion."

The title stings like this, but there is little she can do with Fenris still struggling for consciousness—and even as he drags himself to his side another woman in heavy plate comes around behind him and heaves him roughly to his knees, twists his wrists up behind his back with a sharp movement until he starts with the pain. His eyes fly open, full wide and _furious_ , and when they land on Hawke where she is pinned she sees fear, too—

"That's right," the woman says behind him, and when he tugs she tightens her grip on his arms until he winces. "Your cooperation would be…beneficial to you both."

Hawke clenches her jaw so hard her teeth creak. "It seems you have my attention."

"I said _cooperation_ ," the woman reminds her, and the blood mage still kneeling by Fenris lets out a harsh laugh as he grimaces. "We're wasting time."

Hawke's eyes flick left and then right, counting the number of fighters arrayed in her once-cosy study: six to her left, including two mages; seven to her right and at least two behind, she thinks, though she cannot turn to see them, all of them marked with those pale half-moons—

And then the man holding her twists the blade-tip just a hairsbreadth into her skin and says, "We have a buyer for you, Champion."

His grip in her hair is too tight to stare at him; she settles for a disbelieving bark of laughter. "A _what_?"

Fenris snarls something acidic in Arcanum, throwing himself against the woman's grasp, but the man holding Hawke slides the serrated edge of the blade to the base of her throat and Fenris grits his teeth, subsiding. His eyes burn.

"We don't have time for this," the blood mage says, his voice softer than Hawke expects. "Just kill the elf and let's go."

" _Fine,_ " the woman snaps, reaching for her belt, pulling free a thin knife. Hawke stiffens—Fenris glares, unafraid, but she can see the shadows behind his anger deepen as the woman places the knife's point at the nape of his neck, angles it for a driving thrust upward, draws in a quick breath as her arm tenses—

"Wait!" Hawke bursts out, panic ripping up her spine. "Wait. _Wait_. Don't."

The woman looks to Hawke's holder; Fenris tenses, uncertainty bleeding through his fury. "Hawke—"

"Don't," she snaps, her heart racing, her mind moving even faster, and she wrenches her head back, looks to the man holding her. "Let him live."

His lips curl into a smile. "Persuade me."

Her answer is the obvious one, the _stupid_ one, the one Varric sneers at in other people's work as forced melodrama—but it doesn't matter, it _doesn't,_ neither Fenris's pride nor her own able to check the fear undamming her voice. "I'll go without a fight. You swear to me he won't be hurt and I'll—go with you."

"Hawke, _no_!"

Fenris's voice is as agonized as she's ever heard him but she doesn't dare to look; her captor narrows his eyes, gauging her honesty, and she knows the truth is written in her face but if this is the thing to save Fenris she cannot regret it—

"Fine," he says at last, and he throws out his free hand to the handful of dead bodies scattered on her floor, to the silent soldiers still arrayed around them, waiting, watching. "A dozen witnesses to your oath, Champion. Break it at the elf's peril."

"Fine," she says, a cracking echo, and watches three of them bind Fenris's arms behind his back with heavy iron shackles soldered into one piece and strip him of his armor to leave him in his leathers. They drag him to his feet until he stands on his own, swaying slightly with the effort and still bleeding from his forehead, the lyrium in his skin dead and thin from its draining.

His voice, though, does not waver as he says, one last time, "Hawke." Then he says more quietly, only for her, " _Do not do this._ "

The expression on his face drives through her heart like a nail—but she can find nothing at all to say, no other recourse without her magic, and when one of the men forces a strip of cloth between Fenris's teeth to gag him she grits her teeth and does not look away, because this is what her struck deal has brought them both; this is what her friendship has given him.

 _Champion_ , she thinks bitterly, wincing as too-tight ropes knot around her own wrists, swallowing through the heavy creeping burn of magebane in her veins. Her pierced left hand throbs with each heartbeat, slicking her fingers with her own blood.

Her holder jerks her towards the door, and in her periphery she sees Fenris, bound, gagged, stumble after her.

Helpless.


	2. Chapter 2

Her collector's name is Beran. He is Antivan and older than the Viscount and en route to Kirkwall to meet her, and he has a reputation for losing and gaining enormous sums of wealth very rapidly as his interests change with his tastes. Her captor tells her this easily, openly, as if he does not fear discovery—and he is right not to do so, she finds, when he propels her down her stairs to her cellar and through it to the dim-lit alleys of Darktown beyond. There are few souls out at this hour and none at all inclined to aid a stranger, and even as they move through the streets more shadows slip loose from corners and darkened doorways to attach themselves to their growing company. After the fourth one joins them Fenris moves closer to Hawke's back, bristling, dangerous enough even through the gag and irons that a few of them pale and shy away.

Their de facto leader does not flinch. Instead he laughs, only once, and shakes his head. "That won't do you much good soon," he warns them both, though Fenris only moves closer to her side at the implication, and the press of his pent fury nearly vibrates through the bones of her spine. Her captor does not offer his advice again.

Instead he tells her of Beran, and of Antiva, and as he leads her towards the silent city gates to the Wounded Coast he tells her of the delights she may expect once she has been delivered. Hawke pays him little mind after the first few minutes; she has other concerns to mind and no patience for a man she does not intend to meet, and as they step into the archway over the gate she trips over a flagstone and stumbles hard into Fenris. His shoulders jerk in a short, abortive movement as he tries to catch her with bound hands, but she twists the wrong way and her hand is slick with blood and she can get no purchase at his waist. They go down together, sudden and fast, and Hawke bites back a cry as she lands on her wounded hand.

Then there are more hands, rough on her arms and her hair as they drag her to her feet again, and she has only a moment to meet Fenris's piercing stare before they shove her forward through the high stone archway to the waiting coastline. The gate creaks down behind her, settling into the century-deep grooves worn from walling away the city against a thousand foes, and Hawke does not look back.

After almost an hour of scrub brush and withered trees and narrow foothill paths climbing ever higher along the cliffsides, their captor at last calls a halt. "Nearly there," he tells Hawke. His mood has brightened with each step away from the city; now he is nearly jovial, whistling as he gestures two of his soldiers forward to a small cave-mouth at the end of the path. One of them yawns as they trudge forward into the darkness, lifting a hand in greeting as a short, slim figure comes towards them out of the night.

"Good job, Mick," the woman says, her voice low and husky. What little starlight that falls through the cloud-cover drags along the length of her pointed ears and the brighter edge of her spear's blade, gleaming coldly as her eyes. Her chestplate is battered with old dents, but even in the darkness Hawke can see the beaten gold of a rising half-moon emblazoned in the aged steel. "Bring them inside."

"I live to serve," her captor says with a mock-bow, but his leather-gloved fingers are hard around Hawke's arm as he pushes her towards the cave.

"No need to get violent," she mutters without thinking, and it is not until Mick laughs that she remembers to check herself. Save her _collector_ they know nothing; better to wait, then, and watch her tongue, at least until Fenris can no longer be harmed for her carelessness with it. She cuts a glance at him and winces; his lower lip has split from dryness and the stretching of the gag, the gash on his forehead clotted and matted to his hair, and even with his eyes bright with anger they cannot hide the lingering pain and exhaustion of his marks' draining.

He catches her looking. She does not know what expression she makes, but he gives her a tiny nod and steps closer, and somewhere under the flat fear that has been crushing her for the last two hours there curls a sudden delicate twist of hope.

The cave is cool inside and larger than she expects, smooth brown sandstone worn away into a cavern six times her height at its tallest and deep enough to hold fifty men easily. There are fewer than that now, two dozen or so soldiers all marked with half-moons rising from their scattered campfires and pushing away from walls to gather around their incoming party. Three tall, narrow slave-pens made of gridded iron dominate the back wall. "Maker," one of the nearer soldiers says, astonished, taking a torch from its bracket on the wall and passing it close enough to Hawke's face that she can taste the smoke. "It's really her—"

"Back off," snaps the elf woman with the spear, and her soldiers scatter. She circles around to face them and here Hawke can see her better; her armor is well-maintained but old, the leather skirts thin with years and the seams beginning to fray, the fur lining the insides of her boots stained with sweat. She looks—older than Hawke would have expected, though not _old_ , and her black hair has been cropped very close to her head. Her mouth is thin with tired anger. "Well," she says, stepping forward, "and here's the Champion."

"Signed and delivered," Hawke says, and Fenris shifts at her back. "It would have been easier to send a note."

Instead of responding, her eyes go to Fenris over Hawke's shoulder, and her cold eyes grow colder. "And what is this?"

"Leverage," says Mick. "The Champion won't cooperate without him."

She glances to the lyrium pale-thin on his chin. "I told you to bring her alone. I don't want his magister's attention turned towards us unexpectedly."

"No one saw. No one who cared to stop us, anyway."

They know—they _know_ of Danarius and of the lyrium, _,_ and still they have no wish for Fenris as captive. Hawke does not know if this is better or worse. Fenris lets out a low, vicious noise through his gag, and the woman smiles. "I see. I don't care for witnesses, but he'll do for the time being. Make sure the mages keep him bled dry."

"No," Hawke says, stepping forward, though the abruptness of the motion is cheapened by her tight-bound hands behind her. "He said—you wouldn't hurt him."

Hawke doesn't even see her move. The woman is simply gone—and there again, nearly nose to nose with her, the spear-tip tickling the skin under her left ear.

"I don't think," the woman says quietly, "that you understand your position, Champion. I do not tolerate threats. I do not bargain with captives. I do what I like when I like and for the reasons I like, and the sooner you learn that the sooner you'll find the world easier to live in."

"I've never been one for quiet acceptance," Hawke says, her voice more steady than she expects. "The Arishok learned that personally."

For a moment the woman's eyes narrow—and then she smiles again, stepping back, and leans her weight against her spear. "You're cockier than I expected."

"That and 'shorter.' I get those a lot."

"It's almost as if you're trying my patience on purpose."

"You overestimate my intelligence."

The woman snorts a low, unamused laugh. "It's your compassion I mean to gauge. Tell me," she adds conversationally, "how much do you care for that elf?"

She does not look, but Fenris's heat is a sudden firebrand on her back. He makes another low sound but does not move, and when the woman lifts her eyebrow in expectance Hawke offers her a shrug. "He's a good friend. I think you knew that."

"I know what I've heard. I want to know what you say."

"You can't expect me to give away all my secrets yet. We've only just met."

Her mouth twists in irritation and Hawke knows she's gone too far; then the woman gestures with one hand and Mick is at Fenris's back, one hand on his shackled wrists and the other at the back of his neck, forcing him to his knees. Hawke jerks forward before she can stop herself and the woman laughs, loud enough that the sound echoes back from the cavern walls around them, sharp and bitter as colus leaves. "Leverage indeed," she says into the echoes, and smiles.

 _Shit_ , Hawke thinks, and does not try to stop the edge of panic seeping slowly up her throat. "He doesn't have any part of this. Let him leave, and you'll have my cooperation."

"What did I say about bargaining?" the woman asks, raising her eyebrow again, but she moves closer. "You have so few strings I can grasp, Champion. I have to make do with the ones I can tug to get you dancing."

"What do you mean?" she asks, and knows the answer before she asks it.

The woman's hand moves, slow and hypnotizing as a snake's gaze, sliding from Hawke's shoulder to her elbow and around to her wrist where it is bound behind her. Her eyes flick up to Hawke's, something deep in them hot as coals—and then with no warning but a breath she drives her finger into the open wound in Hawke's palm.

Hawke does not scream. She wants to, desperately, but she will _not_ give such satisfaction so quickly; her breath soughs from her like an emptied sail all the same, Fenris surging against the arms holding him and gaining no purchase, and when the woman pulls back her forefinger is red to the first knuckle with Hawke's blood.

"Do you know why you're here, Champion?"

It takes two tries to get the words out. "A sizeable sack of sovereigns, I suppose."

"I was thinking of something more personal."

"I've never met you before in my life."

"You've met enough like me," the woman says, soft and amused and terribly calm. "Or don't you know your countrymen anymore now that you've sold yourself to Kirkwall?"

 _What_? "You're—Fereldan?"

The woman nods and thumbs the tip of her spear. "Most of the Tides who follow me are. As you were, once."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course not. You've spent too much time scraping your way up Hightown's moist pucker to recognize the people you crushed underfoot to get there."

She is so tired. Her feet ache. Her hand _hurts—_ "Just say what you mean!"

The woman's eyes narrow, and then she shrugs, her spearhead flashing down in an arc with the motion. "Impatience does you little credit." She flicks her gaze to Fenris, just for a moment; then she tips her head. "Perhaps a bargain for your elf's life may be struck after all."

"I'm listening." Pointless to pretend otherwise.

"They grow Fereldans hard. Did you know that? Loyal. Like mabari." She licks her thumb, runs it over the spear's point. "I've owed you a lot of hurt for a long time. I'd like to see how you take it. To see if there's anything left of the roots under the Kirkwall rot."

 _That_ sets her heart to ice, but—she's been hurt before and lived through it, and despite the threat there is still hope at the end of it. "I doubt your buyer will be satisfied with only pieces of his purchase."

She jerks her head at a dark-skinned man lounging against one of the tall cages at the back of the cavern. "You aren't the only one with pet healers, Champion. Beran will get his prize intact. What happens between now and then depends entirely on you."

"On whether I break, you mean."

"Say the word and we stop." She shrugs again. "But then your elf dies instead."

Fenris makes a quick, violent movement from where Mick still holds him to his knees, but Hawke does not falter. She can't afford to be so weak, not now, not with his life so suddenly and squarely in her hands. "I hadn't pegged you for torture."

"You know _nothing_ of me," the woman snarls, mask pierced like bone china, and fists her hand in Hawke's collar. " _Nothing_ of what I've suffered. Not yet. Not yet. But you will."

"Nys," murmurs Mick, and the woman's eyes shutter closed again.

She reaches up, then, touches her bloodied forefinger to Hawke's nose, paints a red stripe over the bridge of it in a mockery of war paint. "Take them both to the cages," she says softly, still holding Hawke's gaze. "Tell Peris to get the table ready."

"Ser," Mick says, hand fisted over his heart in salute, and at his signal a half-dozen soldiers rush to herd them both towards the slave pens at the back of the cavern. Hawke doesn't look back, doesn't need to see to know the woman watches them go.

Nys's eyes burn like ice.

—

The cages are larger than she expects. Tall, twice again her height, ten foot square and lined three in a row, flat iron gratings welded together in a gridded pattern with gaps little larger than her fisted hand, the whole row of them backed by the cavern wall. Hawke is not well-versed in the capacity of slave pens, but she supposes at most they might hold twenty or so slaves among the three sections. Now, though, they stand empty; their captors shove Fenris into the cage on the far end as Hawke stumbles into the middle one, and the doors slam closed behind them like hammers on grave-cold stone.

A thatch of old, musty, damp hay in one corner; a wooden bucket in the other. "Bastards," Hawke mutters, more for the sound of it than the sentiment, and drops to her knees in the cell without wasting a glance on the shuffling of her guard behind her.

The rope around her wrists is thick and tight enough to hurt her shoulders when she twists, but with a minute's effort she manages to work her bound hands under her thighs and knees until they come free in front of her. She doesn't know if this breaks some unspoken rule of the Tides' code for prisoner behavior or if Nys herself will punish her for her efforts, but she doesn't care; the instant her still-bound hands slide loose she is up again and at the bars that keep her from Fenris, reaching the fingers of her better hand through the grating as far as they can go.

He is on his feet already from where they have thrown him; when she comes he is there to meet her, the rage in his face banked beneath cold control, and without more than a measured look he turns to give her access to his gag's knot.

Her hands are clumsy with fatigue and fear despite herself. "Sorry," she whispers when a handful of coarse white strands tear away with the grimy cloth, and means it for more than that. But at last the gag comes free—and it _hurts_ that she can do nothing for the iron shackles at his own wrists, his own back—and Fenris turns on her with his voice as low and dangerous as she has ever heard it.

"Hawke," he says, dried blood spread over his brow, on his split lower lip; then whatever he has planned to say seems to slip away, and instead he leans his forehead hard against the bars where she stands, his eyes pinched tight with frustration and grief, the lyrium run thin and unliving down his throat and the skin of his arms, and he says, again, " _Hawke—_ "

"It's fine," she tells him, hardly knowing what she says. "I'll be fine."

"You must not do this. I will—they—that woman—"

"It doesn't matter—they need me alive. They won't do anything—permanent. I'm not afraid of a little pain."

"There is too much madness here. You _cannot_ let her have you, Hawke!"

The bridge of her nose itches where Nys thumbed her blood. She scrubs at it angrily with the heels of her bound hands; her pierced left palm throbs suddenly at the movement, and she curls her fingers against the hollow of her throat. "If you have a better solution, I'd love to hear it."

" _Run_ ," he snaps. "At the first chance."

"With no magic. With no weapon."

His lip curls, splits again. "As if this would have stopped you in the past."

"Your life has never been at stake in the past."

He recoils, head turning away as if struck; then he looks at her and for a moment she sees— _something_ —but before she can put a name to the quick heart-wild emotion he closes it away behind a glare. "They have hurt you already. There will be more. It is…" he murmurs, and she hears the _I am_ beneath it, "not worth the cost."

"Stop it," Hawke whispers, fury choking her like a fist; louder, she says, "Just _stop,_ Fenris. You're making it worse."

"You risk too much!"

"You're wrong!" The words come as sharp as paned glass breaking; she wraps her good hand around the bars between them and leans closer, close enough that his lyrium would flicker if he had it, that her magic would spark if there were any left beneath her skin. She doesn't know how to tell him—that they are discussing this at all is the highest absurdity, and yet she must make him understand. "You're so _wrong_ , Fenris. Everything we've been through—everything we've—" She swallows through the thickening in her throat and reaches deep, looks for the steel inside her heart. "I won't leave you behind. Not when I can protect you now."

" _Hawke,_ " he says, and his voice is low and unsteady and rough as unsanded stone—

The lock to her door clicks open.

A woman stands there, impassive, helmeted, and faceless; she reaches out one gloved hand and says, "It's time, Champion."

Her stomach leaps and fails to settle again; her heart skips, once, then thunders ahead like a racing horse. Behind her Fenris makes a sharp, wounded noise and presses closer to her through the bars but she does not turn, does not have the strength to see his eyes and still face what comes.

Hawke lifts her head and walks forward.


	3. Chapter 3

Hawke knows Fenris is losing his mind.

She can see him, sometimes, between the faces that peer over her, or when Mick tilts the table so that her head hangs lower than her feet, or when Nys unshackles her and drags her to the makeshift arena in the center of the cavern. He paces often, back and forth like the caged thing he is, the ice of his anger beyond words, feral, immeasurable; when they move her he follows along the edge of the cage as if it matters, ignoring the taunts and jeers of the Tides that flow around him as if they truly are little more than the babbling water they are named for.

His face is the one thing she remembers through the timeless pain.

They have been here two days. Three—no, two. She had marked the second sunrise only a few hours ago—Nys had made a mention of it as Mick had tightened the screw on her right ankle. _That_ had been her own fault; early in the first afternoon she'd tried to back away from a punch and had stepped badly into a banked firepit. Her ankle had twisted and swiftly swelled, purpling under the beating that had come after, and Nys had been quick to exploit the weakness in the following hours.

The edge of daylight seeps up the silver mail of one of her guards, flickering like white fire on the whorls and ridges as if to melt the steel liquid again, moving just to brush the tips of the man's gauntlet and no further. His armored shoulders flash as he leans forward, towards her, his face dipping into darkness; his mouth moves and she cannot track the words through the ringing in her left ear. She would like to feel the sun, she thinks.

She is so tired.

White-hot healing slams into her chest like a hammer, leaving Hawke with no breath to even cry out. Her spine arches against the unfinished wood of the table and pops twice with the strain, but there is no relief and no respite from the incessant crush of clumsy magic. And it _is_ clumsy, the Tides' healer ill-trained and ill-intentioned, and Hawke has spent too many years with the weightless strength of Anders's magic to be prepared for the brute force of this healing. There is no delicacy to it, no precision; Peris heals like a clenched fist, and Hawke knows that despite his efforts being both immediate and thorough there will be damage left in her from this.

Someone yanks at her left hand and Hawke sucks in a breath. She knows what comes after this, the sudden agony, the biting heat of magebane packed into and around the open wound in her palm. Worse, she knows what it will mean—Peris's healing, rough as it is, dampened even further for hours yet; the electric surging of her senses as the poison sludges through her blood, bursting each blow and cut twice again its strength.

Behind her Fenris lets out a grunt through clenched teeth, and even through her closed eyes she sees the white-blue flare of lyrium-light off the cavern walls before it dies again. They have worked a rhythm with this, Nys and her Tides, choking them both on poison and blood magic at the same moment, draining them both of their strength and strengthening themselves in the doing of it.

They have not hurt him otherwise. She is grateful for that.

"Wake up," says a voice in her ear, and Hawke forces her eye open. The other swelled shut the day before and has not opened again; with the magebane sapping Peris's healing, she doubts it will for at least another day.

For a moment the world dips and blurs; then it settles again into Nys's tight mouth and her pointed ears jutting from close-cropped hair, into the dark skin and darker expression of Peris behind her. "What?" she asks, because she is still enough of herself to ask it.

"Wake up," Nys says again, and pinches the skin between Hawke's thumb and forefinger until the sharp tips of her gloves pierce it to bleeding. Hawke sucks in an unsteady, rattling breath, lets it out again. "You don't get to sleep. Not here."

"Two—" Hawke says, and licks cracking lips with a dry tongue. "Two days. I'm tired."

"I can fix that."

"No—" Hawke starts, panicked; then the screw on her ankle twists and she _shrieks_ , throwing her head back against the wood, straining fists with swollen, bloody knuckles against the steel-bolted cuffs that hold her as if that might ease the pain streaking silver behind her eyes. "No, please—please— _please—_ "

"Please, what?" Nys asks from very far away.

Hawke says, weeping, "Please. Stop."

"Give me the elf."

"No," Hawke whispers, and closes her eyes as the screw tightens into her skin, bone. "No."

Somewhere, Nys laughs. Somewhere, Fenris watches, helpless.

_No._

—

Fenris closes his eyes as Hawke begins to scream.

He has begun to learn the difference in them, lately; these are the short, interrupted, gasping noises of Nys's work rather than Mick's deeper, wire-drawn wails. A part of him is amazed that even now she has the strength for it. A greater part wishes she did not—it would be easier, he thinks, feeling the hollow of his heart echo with the sound, if she would surrender. They have been two days in this pit; surely she must be near breaking. He is.

He is _not worth this._

Hawke's lifting voice cuts off in a sudden bubbling gasp, and Fenris turns in time to see her head drop low to her chest, finger-wide trails of blood on her lip, on her chin. His stomach drops—but before he can speak or move or _breathe_ Nys's pet mage steps forward, palms lifted to Hawke's heart. Blue-white light flickers between his fingers in cold embers, darting nail to nail, jumping the little distance to Hawke's throat; then she arches again with wild white-rolling eyes and a half-sob of agony, and when the light fades at last she sags in her bonds, her eyes closed, boneless, hopeless.

"Enough," Nys says to the Tides loud enough that even Fenris can hear it, and gestures at the maimed place on Hawke's hand. "Dose her and put her in the cell. We'll take it up again at dusk." Hawke mutters something Fenris cannot make out, but Nys lets out a loud bark of laughter and says, "I'll remedy that tonight, Champion."

Then someone is at Hawke's hand and someone else at her wrists and ankles, unshackling her, untwisting the steel wire from her thighs, the leather strap from her neck. They drag her from the table and she stumbles twice as they force fresh magebane into the open wound on her hand and wrap it again; then at _last_ her cell door swings open with a joint-creaking groan and Hawke falters her way into the narrow iron-barred room. No sunlight reaches here in the deepest part of the cavern; he is selfishly thankful for that. Her bruises are too stark by daylight.

"Hawke," Fenris says, and her eyes swing up to his face in weary surprise before she goes to her knees. He leans hard against the bars with one shoulder, cursing the shackles that still keep his wrists bound at the small of his back, cursing himself for his own thrice-damned _weakness_ , and he says again, "Hawke—"

"Sorry," she breathes from all fours, great shuddering breaths shaking down her spine. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm fine."

He crouches down himself as Hawke slide-crawls towards him, her left hand held close against her chest, her ankle swollen more than twice its size and dragging behind her like a dead thing. He breathes, "Liar."

"Only because I—care."

"Don't. Stop this. Tell them—give them—"

"I won't," she sighs, and comes to rest at last with her head leant back against the bars where he kneels. "Don't ask again."

"Hawke…"

"Fenris," she says, and there is a pleading in her voice so alien that something deep in him breaks. "Will you make me beg for this, too?"

He opens his mouth and—says nothing. There is nothing he can say to that. No apology will rectify this; no consolation he can offer can possibly make up for what he has put her through by his very presence. If she asks for his silence even now—but it is the only thing he can give her, here, and until he can lay Nys's hot-bleeding heart at Hawke's feet with his own hands there will be no relief for either of them.

At last, he says, "As you wish."

"Fenris," she says eventually, once he has settled with his own back to the bars, his bound fingertips just brushing the floor, the heat from her pain-swollen skin flooding through the grating over his bare shoulder. "Do you think they've found the crest?"

His hand twitches for his belt; when that fails he glances down, only for an instant, at the place on his belt where the Amell crest had once been pinned, where Hawke had torn it free under the pretense of falling to hide it in the mud at Kirkwall's coastal gate. They have been gone two days. "Yes," he says.

Hawke laughs once, softly, and says, "Liar."

They neither of them move for a long time. Eventually, Hawke lets herself slide sideways until she rests on the hay-strewn stone behind him, biting back all but the worst noises of pain, and sighs. "I'm so tired."

"Sleep, Hawke."

"I don't… think I can."

"Your—" he starts slowly; then he hesitates, because surely this is too personal, surely this is not something for him to profane in this place. But if she will sleep… "Your mother. When you were young. She…" he pauses again, groping for memories, "sang to you?"

Hawke huffs a sudden laugh, as soft as the first but more marked for having nothing of amusement. "Are you going to sing to me, Fenris?" He flinches at her tone—her sarcasm is acidic when she is in pain—but before he can respond she softens, lets out a long breath, turns her head until she can look up at him from the corner of one weary eye. "She told us stories."

"Of what?"

"Anything. Everything. Fairy tales. Stories of how she and my father met. Places she visited as a child." Hawke stops herself, her unfocused gaze drifting over the iron bars of their cages, the twoscore Tides between them and freedom, the open wounds in her own skin: thighs torn by steel wire; hand pierced, drugged; ankle swollen and black and useless; bruises, cuts, burns. "As far from this as anything I could imagine."

He closes his eyes. "I have spoken to you of Seheron before."

"Once. Not much."

Once—

 _Hot_. Humid as any steaming bath-house. Trees with leaves as broad as his shoulders, green light filtering down through greener leaves. Bare feet silent on the hidden paths that led to still pools—he tells her of all these things and more, of the little waterfalls fed by underground streams that sprang from nothing and vanished into nothing, of the heavy sluicing rains, of the green shining of great cats' eyes in the dark. She smiles when he means her to, and laughs twice, and when eventually she closes her eyes it is as great a victory as he can imagine given the cost of it.

He does not stop speaking, though, and does not move away. Instead he listens to her even breathing and tells her of the way the sky changed during the jungle storms; of the Fog Warriors and their kindness; of the way, for an instant, there was peace. _He_ cannot find peace for her now; he can only offer stories of it as the sun crawls its way down the cavern walls again.

But Fenris gives her what he can, and speaks through her sleep, and waits for dusk.


	4. Chapter 4

There is no rescue.

They beat Hawke well into the night, stopping only when the small group of foragers returns with a handful of hare and grouse for the evening meal. Hawke they leave strapped to the table, forgotten for the moment; Fenris cannot see her face clearly from his cage, but the laxness of her limbs tells him she is either asleep or unconscious and it eats at his mind like _teeth_ that he is trapped like this, helpless. When they are finished they throw the scraps and a half-full waterskin through the iron bars of Fenris's cage and Hawke's alike, laughing at him as he collects them, as he _ignores_ them, stripping the better pieces of meat for Hawke, when she returns—is returned to him. His hands are not clean, he knows, blood and dirt and worse under his nails and in the cracks of his palms, but they are better than the floor.

Eventually, Hawke's door opens. She eats—he helps her eat; he helps her drink, and when she is finished the door opens again and she is gone.

And so the night goes.

The next day is similar, and the day after that, and the day after that. The hours run together; the sun rises and shines and sets without a thought paid to it by either of them. There is no world beyond this cave, not anymore. Instead there is only screaming and pleading, cruel laughter, the chink of metal chains and the flickering blue-white glow of magic. He marks the hours only in how long Hawke suffers through them; he marks the morning and the night only when moonrise brings sleep to the Tides.

They catch him working his door's hinges with his cuffs' metal edges. They remove the cuffs, giving him a freedom that lifts his heart only for a moment; then they break two of Hawke's fingers as retribution, and he does not try to escape again. His efforts here have done him little good and Hawke only harm, and even now with both his hands he can do nothing to help her. They must wait. _He_ must wait.

Time passes.

Nothing changes.

—

"Shit!"

Hawke rolls to her side, away from the metal-toed boot, and cups her good hand over her now twice-broken nose. Blood slides hot and iron-harsh over her lips, down the back of her throat; she gags, coughs through it, and musters a feeble spit into the dirt under her shoulder. Shadows flicker wildly from the torches burning in their sconces, giving the world a crazy tilt as she tries to rise. She breathes again, realizing, " _Shit_."

Nys's voice comes from a thousand miles above her. "Get up."

"Can't," says Hawke, tongue clumsy and split again from the blow. She rolls to her side anyway, elbow braced against the broken rib, but there is no purchase, no hope—then hands fist in her hair and on the back of her neck and on her bruised upper arms, and they pull her to her feet. "Ah," Hawke says, her head rolling down to her chest and up again, "there we go."

"Always so glib," says Nys, and the first punch lands hard in her stomach.

All the air in her lungs sighs out at once, a deep-soughing gasp that leaves her empty, and when the next fist comes there is nothing left to go. The blows come quick after that, one-two-three and hard as anger can make them, and when she loses count it doesn't matter, because the ribs are broken already, and the eye is swollen shut already, and more bruises now make little difference for the future. Her nose, twice broken; her thighs opened with lacing wire; her hand, pierced, wounded and kept wounded, numb at the fingers and lancing pain up the inside of her wrist.

No mage to heal these wounds. No healer, not really, not to keep the blood from sickening and the veins from infection. Just enough to keep her alive. Not even whole. Only alive.

Nys has no intentions of selling her.

Once she might have, Hawke thinks, closing her eyes as the knuckles move up her waist, her collarbone, land hard on the underside of her chin so that her teeth clack together. Not now. Not for full price, anyway, and it is not until the last word gives way to a savage laugh that she realizes she has said it aloud.

"You mock me?" the man before her asks, eyebrows pinching down in black fury, and before she can explain her newfound understanding his fist opens like a flower, thick, callused fingers unfolding to curl around the narrow column of her throat. "Laugh again, Champion," he snarls, and his fingers tighten.

"Can't—" she wheezes, amusement gone, lungs aching under the pressure, throat _hurting—_

The man clenches his fingers harder into her throat and something cracks in her chest—then all the muscles of his shoulders tense at once and he shoves forward, tearing her from the arms that hold her, forcing her backwards until her back is flat against wood: her table nearly upended on its swiveling supports. His knee lands in her stomach, and she gags again at the blood in the back of her throat.

"How _dare_ you," he spits. "How dare you look at me—how dare you _, bitch!_ "

"Sorry," she gasps through his fingers, eyes wheeling to the dark cavern roof, the same plea she has made for four days now, five days, the same hopeless helpless begging against a crime she cannot comprehend. "Sorry—sorry—"

Nys's face, swimming into sight above the man's shoulder, cold, impassive, implacable. Nys's voice, low and husky: "Tell her."

"You killed my brother."

She does not know what he means—and there are others behind him now, behind Nys, five faces, ten faces, dark eyes and light eyes and dark skin and light skin and all hard mouths, all hatred, all bitterness and grief and because of _—her—_

"You don't remember. I'm not surprised." He laughs, an ugly sound, and digs his knee deeper into her stomach. "You wouldn't. Just a faceless mercenary, a Ferelden-born dog-lord who happened to join the wrong group to feed a pregnant wife. But what's that to you, Champion, besides a fistful of gold coins and a secondhand longsword?"

"I don't—"

"You didn't even have the decency to let him lie where he fell, did you? No, the second you slaughter him—you go rifling through his pockets. _Fereldan—_ " he snarls again, and this time there is no breath that can escape his steel-fingered grip— "Worthless _trash._ I didn't even know he was dead until I found his signet ring in a Lowtown merchant's stall."

Hawke coughs, chokes, vision blackened as much by the hand at her throat as the memory—or the lack of it.

"Careful," Nys says, and at last the fingers loosen. White swells at the edges of her vision to chase back the black, but at the center of the rushing stars there is always Nys's face, Nys's voice. "Remember: you're not the only one."

"How many?" Hawke croaks, good hand lifted halfway to her throat. She can reach no further.

Nys turns, lifts her chin, sweeps out her arm to the twoscore Tides sweeping in around her, swallowing her whole. "Every one."

A woman steps up behind the man still holding her, her narrow, lined face familiar, her dark blonde hair pulled back behind her ears. "My sister, Lilley. Worked for the Coterie after the ship dropped us off with no word of aid. She didn't even work against you—she _helped_ you, and she died anyway. You left her in Darktown to rot."

Javaris, gone, and his wares for auction—she remembers—

"My daughter idolized you. A free mage, from _Ferelden_ besides—and then a templar came to my door in the small hours of the night to take her, because she was careless enough to light a candle without a match." A spray of spittle on her forehead. "You lead by example, and you damned her with it."

"I don't—"

A woman, tall, slim-shouldered, green eyes and a vicious mouth: "You told my husband to return to his work in the Bone Pit. You knew it was dangerous; you _knew_ no man would be safe there, and yet you told him to go back anyway because he would be paid a copper more than a pittance. And now he's dead at the bottom of a hole because you didn't keep the dragons from their nests."

A man with brown hair and a beard: "My brother, too. Dead the second year we got here."

"My childhood friend, because the Coterie was the only one who would hire her."

"My father."

"Two of my cousins."

"My wife."

"My—"

"Stop," Hawke whispers, as if that might change her history, might change the faces spaced around her, might change the cruel-dawning realization settling over her shoulders. She does not doubt them— _cannot_ doubt them, no matter how she wishes to, not with grief so hard in their faces, not with the strength in their blows that comes only from loss-stoked rage. So many have died at her hand. Too many. Not innocents, not always—she is not so broken as to think that, even here—but too many people have bled under her booted feet, too many lives have been stolen because she could not see them beyond her own. How many men has she killed like this—how many—looted and discarded because _she_ needed their gold, their armor, never mind the cost, never mind the trail of bodies? Not her, not important.

_How many have you got, Hawke?_

Too many.

Nys looks at her from the center of them all, unblinking. Hawke says, wondering, lost, "And you?"

Nys does not move for a very long time, her eyes unblinking, her close-cropped black hair curling close over her pointed ears. Then, at last, without a shift of muscle or skin, she sighs, "My son."

"Your son."

Nys reaches back for the spear strapped to her shoulders; when it comes free she holds it lengthwise in her hands, hefting it, testing its weight. "His father died in the Blight. We fled here with a few from our alienage, because there was no place in the Free Marches that could be so cruel as what we had left." She lets out a short, humorless laugh, and swivels the spear until the point of it rests at the hollow of Hawke's throat. She lifts her chin and looks—old, and tired, and even still the anger bleeds through the cracks like flame beneath scorched earth. "Do you know what we found?"

"No."

"I will tell you. We found a thousand more like us: no coin, no hope, no work. We found a city as friendless as any has ever been to elves, and twice as cruel to Fereldans."

"And then?" Hawke asks, because Nys expects her to ask it.

"And then," Nys says, the spear-tip tickling up Hawke's throat and down it again, "we started to hear word of one of our own. Not one of the people, but Fereldan, and a refugee like us, and if she was one of us she would not forget us as she rose, would she?"

"I didn't—"

"No," says Nys. "You didn't."

She jerks her head and two Tides wrestle Hawke back to the table's surface. Her ankle will not straighten any longer with the massive swelling; it twists beneath her and she cries out at the stab of pain, again when Nys pierces the skin between her collarbones with the spear-tip. "You did not help us. You did not remember us. We _bled_ to pave your way and you did not look back at us _once!_ "

"I'm sorry," Hawke breathes, knowing the words are worth nothing, knowing even if she means them it does not matter in the face of the suffering before her.

"My son was ten. He was ill. Darktown does not keep its streets clean—and when the chokedamp came he could not breathe." Nys's mouth twists in a grief Hawke has no name for, has only seen once before on her own mother's face when they boarded a ship on the edge of a white river with one fewer than they had left Lothering with—Bethany's body burned and buried with everything left of the lives they had once kept. "I had no coin. No food. No soul to beg to for either. _But_ ," she adds, eyes glittering, "there was a healer in Darktown."

_Anders—_

"I carried my son to him. The lamp was unlit, but the door was open. I went in." There is a pause; then the corners of Nys's mouth tighten, lining her cheeks, lining the deep hollows beneath her eyes. "There was no one there. The clinic was empty."

Hawke opens her mouth—but there is nothing to say.

"I waited." She says the words like the words to a hymn and there is silence, not only from the people around her but from the cavern air, from the cage where Fenris paces, always paces, from the narrow patch of world outside the cavern mouth where there is nothing but stars and deep twilight. "For hours, I waited. No one came. I held my son in my arms, and I was helpless." She licks her lips, lost in memory. "The fever burned him to ash as I watched."

This woman does not deserve pity, Hawke thinks. Every part of her skin hurts and her bones ache and her _hand_ —but—

"And _then_ ," Nys says, and in her voice there is a new hardness, a sudden profound hatred as old as the roots to a great, poisoned oak, "hours after my child had died in my arms, hours after he went cold and hardened while I held him, I heard voices outside the doors at last. A man's voice." She meets Hawke's eyes. "Your voice."

She cannot remember. She does not insult Nys with the knowledge.

"Do you know what you said, my countrywoman?" Nys asks her, raising her chin with the flat blade of the spear, leaning closer than she needs to. "Do you know what you told the healer while I held my dead son's body?"

Hawke knows Nys knows her answer before she gives it. "I don't."

Nys smoothes her thumb over Hawke's cheek, smears blood in a long trail under her jaw, moves forward until her mouth brushes against the tangled hair over Hawke's ear. "Back to the old grindstone, hmm?" she murmurs, her breath hot. "Fine. Abandon me to the woes of Wicked Grace, as if you've got nothing better to do than heal sailor's itch. See if I care."

Hawke closes her eyes.

"Do you care now, Champion?"

She breathes, "Yes."

"Two years too late," Nys says, just as quietly, and then the spear drives forward, and Hawke does not speak again.

—

For an instant Fenris thinks Nys has killed her.

He did not know before this moment that his body could live without a heart to drive it; then Hawke lets out a soft, wet groan that at once relieves and cracks him through all over again. The Tides have gathered around her too close for him to see what has happened, what new thing has been done to her. He can only see the quivering end of the spear jutting upward like a beacon to say: here is failure made manifest.

He clenches his fists at his sides. Her gasps hang in the cavern air around him like birds' wings, streaking from wall to wall and back again.

Oh, but he will _slaughter_ them when he is loose.

At last the Tides recede, and he has just enough time to see the flat spear-head where it is embedded in the muscle at the base of Hawke's neck before Nys pulls it free. With nothing to hold her to the table Hawke sags to her knees and then to her elbows, left hand cupped close against her chest, spear-wound seeping blood into the ruined collar of her robe. Her face is white.

Nys gestures sharply into the crowd; then the healer comes, the healer who cares nothing for pain and the lessening of it, and when he is finished with his work and Hawke is writhing at his feet, he wipes his hands on his tunic and says something softly to Nys. She listens, nods, gestures again, and two tall Tides drag Hawke to her cell. Nys does not watch her go.

Hawke stays where they throw her, thin breaths coming quick and quiet, and does not flinch when the door clangs closed behind her. From here Fenris cannot see her face; the moon is bright tonight for how lightless the world seems, and when Hawke sucks in a deeper breath the light strings itself in white-glittering beads down the line of tears on her cheek.

Fenris wraps his fingers around the iron bars, a cliché, an anchor in this prison's unending nightmare. "Hawke," he says, as if there is anything to be done. As if there is anything he can do.

"They're not," she whispers, cuts herself off with a cough, tries again: "They're not going to sell me."

Fenris closes his eyes. There is a long-swelling silence broken only by Hawke's rough breathing and the soft and distant murmur of the Tides at shift-change, and then, quietly, as if the words were not stones in his heart, he says, "I know."

"You know."

He does. He has known since the first broken nose, the first knife-tip dug too deep to keep from scarring, the first mark burnt into the soft flesh of her forearm. Nys's torture has had everything of revenge and nothing of profit in it, her eyes turned only to Hawke's suffering. No slavers marred their merchandise so lightly, not when coin depended on its face; no buyer would take a thing so wretched as the creature Hawke has become, unable to stand, barely able to speak, filthy, broken. Animal in everything but mind.

"Yes," he says in answer.

She lets out a bitter bark of a laugh. "You didn't tell me."

"I didn't—" he fumbles for words, struggles to put an explanation to something so ephemeral as blind hope now crushed to ruin. "You had enough of a burden to carry."

"That's one way to put it." At last, with great effort, Hawke rolls to her back, then again to her side until she faces him, until her forehead rests against the cool iron-dark bars at his feet. They are stained with rust and old blood; she breathes and it comes away on her skin, brown flaking dust smearing over her bruises as if the earth already reaches to bury her beneath it. Fenris shudders and kneels.

Her left hand has fallen palm-up between her chin and the bars. The white wrapping is dark now, stained with more things than Hawke's blood, and even from the little distance between them Fenris can smell the acrid scent of magebane beneath its surface. Angry red lines scratch across her palm, the insides of her fingers; more follow the veins inside her wrist, reaching up like knotted winter-bare branches towards the crook of her elbow. Silently, he reaches through the bars, touches the tips of her fingers where they burn. She does not move; he grows bolder, slides his thumb under the stained, stiff bandage until it comes free over her fingers to bare the wound to better air, curls his hand around her wrist where her stubborn heart keeps time despite itself.

The arrow-mark is dark in her palm, a black spot with angry raw edges tinged green from too many days without real healing. There is nothing left of the magebane for him to pick away; he is left with what sickened satisfaction he can find in that at least the bandage cannot poison her further.

With great effort, Hawke's eyes slide open again. She looks at him where he holds her, where her life beats, and her fingers twitch once, feebly. Then she sighs, and there is a resignation in the sound of it that sends lofty terror spiraling through him so suddenly it leaves him dizzy.

He says, "How long?"

"Has it been infected? I don't know." Her fingers twitch again. "Magebane's toxic with prolonged use. They know that. It's been numb for…I don't know. A day. Maybe more. The fever's been here longer."

The words are an echo without an answer, an empty refrain. "You did not tell me."

One corner of her mouth turns up in a smile, but she does not give him his answer back again.

They sit like this, Fenris's fingers moving over Hawke's fever-hot skin. He does not tell her stories of Seheron; she does not ask. Instead he thinks of Kirkwall, and of a night three years ago and three wasted years' worth of his own thrice-damned stupidity, and of Varric and Isabela and Aveline and Sebastian and even Anders and Merrill sitting somewhere warm and safe, wondering, searching, a map spread before them with no hiding-place marked to guide them. He does not pretend they are not looking. For Hawke's sake if not his own he knows they worry, and despite this knowledge he does not pretend there is not a helpless rage in him that they still have not been found.

Five days dawning, and they are still trapped.

Some time later, Hawke draws in a breath, shifts closer to the bars between them. The movement pulls Fenris from his uneasy dozing; he bends closer, touches her wrist again. They are so far from their first meeting that he can hardly fathom the change; the rage in him now is a reminder of that old, poisoned anger, and for a moment he hears his own voice again, as if from a very great distance: _I should have realized sooner what you really were._

What she really was—what she _is_ , now, and nothing left of either of them.

"Fenris," Hawke murmurs. Her fingers twitch.

"Yes?"

"I want," she says, and sighs, and closes her eyes. "I want you to do something for me."

_Anything_ — "Yes. Hawke. Yes."

She opens her eyes again and they are blazing, bright as flame and burning hotter, clear and sane and without fear and _oh_ she terrifies him, and she loves him, he _knows_ , and though she burns there is a glory in it, every part of him yearning to step out of shadow to meet her, drawing closer until he burns, too, goes up in smoke so long as it is _with her_ —

Hawke says, "Kill me."

A pyre, her bound atop it, eyes heavenward, no light but what takes her from him.

" _Hawke_ ," he breathes. "No."

"Why not?" she asks, moon-touched, pale as ash, as if she has asked for nothing more than a worthless bauble. "If you don't, Nys will. She will not be as—kind."

_What manner of mage are you?_

His voice roughens with each word, emotion throttling him like a stone. "Do not ask me to do this."

"I haven't asked you for anything else. I know you have the strength—"

"I am not strong enough for that."

"You are. Their apostates are all untrained. Peris has not been thorough lately—your blood mages haven't either, have they?"

Strong enough, perhaps, if one gauged only the strength of the lyrium and not his heart—but not yet enough to escape, not enough to run, not enough to _save Hawke_. "No."

"Yes," she whispers through her teeth, a thin sigh like steam rising, like a sailcloth torn from top to bottom at the end of a crying storm. "Please."

"Hawke," Fenris says, her name a prayer and a denial, the thought of the act as brutal and hard and hopeless as the doing of it, crushing him as surely as if she has torn his heart from her chest with her own hands.

"There is no other way."

"I will—we will run. The others will come. I will—we—"

"There is no other way," she says again, gently, and places her good hand atop his where it is clenched knuckle-white on the stone.

He says, brokenly, as if it matters, "I can't bear the thought of living without you."

Hawke's eyes go wide and she flinches, as if the words are a blow she has not anticipated. She stares at him a moment more, gaze piercing in the darkness; then she says, aghast, "How _could_ you?"

He fumbles for her hand, takes it in his own, wraps his fingers around her numb ones—stares at the red cloth binding his wrist, binding more than that. "Hawke—I—"

" _Here_ ," she whispers, gasping out something between a sob and wild laughter. "Of all places—here— _now_ —? Do you even know what—you—how _could you_ , Fenris?"

"Forgive me," he says, the words burning up the back of his throat, his chest burning, his eyes burning. "Hawke. I can't."

"You won't."

"I won't."

She is silent a long time. Then tears spill free at last, slow at first and then faster, sliding over the bridge of her nose to disappear into her matted hair, to wet the parched stone under her head. "How selfish," she whispers, and the words are so soft he does not know if she means him to hear them. "Fenris. You _selfish_ bastard."

_What is it that you seek?_

He says nothing. He _is_ selfish, craven as any man he has ever known, weak in ways even the weakest slave could best, helpless, unable to do the one thing Hawke has asked of him in five days of torture. "Coward," she adds when he will not look at her, and that is true, too. She does not even have the strength to roll away from him again; instead she pulls her hand from his and puts it over her own eyes, closing him out, closing out this shadowed place that has taken from her everything she valued, everything he once thought to give her.

It is not enough to quiet the sounds of her crying. He stays where he kneels as she lies weeping before him, his head bowed, hands knotted, iron-fisted on his knees, red-stained cloth staring back at him from his wrist, silent, accusing, resigned.

_Helpless_ , Fenris thinks, and knows his heart enough to name it for what it is:

Despair.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Because I am a gigantic dork, I have made a recording of the Fereldan lullaby I've written as the epigraph for this part. Listen here: tinyurl.com/kzdaqyo

Part Two

—

Come, little bird: fly faster, fly home.  
Your wind-beaten wing-beats have carried you far.  
Is your soul so weary? so lonely as mine?  
No moonlight outshines your bright home-guiding star.

What green wood flew you by? What white waves soared you through?  
What high star-peaked mountains leapt you in the dark?  
Wonderer, wanderer, bitter-sweet yearning,  
Come back, little bird, my hearth-home, my heart.

—a Fereldan lullaby

—

Hawke wakes up.

For a moment she is not—quite—sure where she is. Then she recognizes the worn, weft-thin quilt over her legs, the straw poking her left palm through the mattress, the small square window set with real glass.

Lothering.

Bethany's bed is already made; she can hear Carver's voice outside near the pigyard, raised but unangry. She swings her feet over the side of the tick mattress and puts her hand to her head—her forehead is _burning_ but she feels…fine, even happy, and before the sunlight spilling in from the window over her bed catches her she pushes to her feet.

"Are you hungry?" her father asks.

Hawke looks up at him across the gold-wooded kitchen table. He seems taller than she remembers, and broader, but he still has the same beard and the same copper-coin eyes flashing at her above his smile, and in one hand he holds the old iron skillet that her mother used to threaten to beat him with. "Hungry?" he asks again.

"Yes," she says, slowly, because she is, but there is something…something she has forgotten. Her left hand pricks her; she looks down to find it resting on the tines of a fork on the table, and she flicks the fork away with her forefinger.

Bethany's voice sounds first outside, lifted and lilting with laughter, and then her sister stumbles in through the iron-barred, blood-stained door with her hair in disarray and her eyes alight. "Such a fool," she gasps between her sobs of laughter, and takes two quick steps to brace herself on the back of Hawke's chair. "Only Carver—!"

"What has he done now?" her father asks as if he dreads the answer, but Hawke can see the merriment she has known from infancy in his face. His hand tightens on the skillet, and for a moment she smells blood and raw meat.

"Nothing. Only convinced himself he could walk the rails of the fence like he used to when he wasn't a great _hulking brute—_ "

"Shut up," Carver snarls, stepping in behind her. He is dripping mud from head to toe, his face barely visible behind the darkened smears, dried blood, a poison in his veins that she can do nothing to heal, not with all the magic in the world behind her eyes. "Or better yet—here—"

"No!" Bethany shrieks as Carver wrestles her into a rough sort of hug, laughing again as he thumbs mud across her cheeks, across the bridge of her nose. "Stop it! Idiot—"

"A hungry one, at any rate," her father says, and turns back to the stove. "Are you all right, Hawke?"

She blinks—

—and he is facing her again, his eyes green, not gold, his brows thicker than they should be, and pinched together as if he is in pain. "Hawke?"

"What?"

"What's wrong?"

She looks over at Carver. The iron-grated wall behind him has opened now, to a cavern deep beneath the world and a tunnel that leads only into darkness. The blue of his Warden's uniform is very bright where the torchlight hits it. "You're not here," she says.

Bethany laughs, stirring her hair, and leans over the back of her chair until her cheek brushes against Hawke's. The side of her head is wet with blood, dark and shining in the lightning strikes that fork across the mouth of the cave, sparks skittering up through the veins of Hawke's legs, alighting in her left hand as she reaches to cup them, a thousand fireflies caught in white flame.

Fenris says, "You. Guard. Find your leader—Hawke is ill. Get your healer—get someone—"

"Hungry?" her father asks again, angling the skillet towards her, and this time she can see the empty black bowl of it steaming into the thicker air.

"It's empty."

"Of course it is," her father says, and adds, "Get her out of there. If you've let her die it'll be _you_ on that rack next, you stupid _ass_."

She twists in her chair—and there, not three steps behind her, are dozen armored, faceless templars, all circling her, all with gauntleted hands touching the hilts of their flaming swords.

"Come here," one says, and stretches out his hand.

Hawke's heart _stops._

Every nightmare she has ever had made real—how long has she dreaded this? How many times has she awoken from sleep in a cold sweat because she dreamed again of the gloved hand around her throat, of Silence, of a phylactery chaining her to a tower and a cell until the memory of her family fades into grey stone—

The templars reach for her.

"No," she whispers.

Bethany's voice softly in her ear: "Please don't do anything—" and Carver, lifting the wine-dark goblet to his lips—

She turns and runs.

It is slow going at first—the alley is narrow and bent at odd angles and her ankle is clumsy and soft—but then she catches her rhythm between her sobbing breaths, fleeing the way her father taught her to, flying the way a hawk does: into the sun.

The sky is _blinding_ after so long, white stab-sharp needles of torchlight piercing her hands, her shoulders, the backs of her eyes. She fumbles forward, her good hand pressed over her watering eyes, and touches iron grating; then there are hands on her arms, hard hands, grasping hands to hold her back, dragging her away from the iron bars she clutches at, shrieking, screaming, weeping.

"Stop it! Let her go—stop— _stop—_ "

"Get back, elf!" A blow, flesh on flesh, and a sharp crack, and a long spiky oath in Arcanum, harsh consonants twisting in on themselves until they blister open again.

Bethany points up. "I can never remember. Are these stalagmites or stalactites?"

Her grip snaps and they drag her backward, and Hawke's head rolls loose on her shoulders as she laughs. "That's Varric's line," she tells her sister where she leans against the bars, and her heels dig furrows into the dirt as she struggles, as she tries without purchase to keep herself from the table behind her.

Her father's voice booms down from the cavern ceiling, ricocheting off the pillars of rock, the low iron cages. "My magic will serve that which is best in me, not that which is most base."

She twists in their arms, searching, desperate—and another memory, another lifetime: a wooden chair and a pair of newborns, one in each arm, her mother behind him, her own hand on his knee. Her father's voice, the same voice, but a tenderness so rare and deep-rooted she cannot fathom it: _This is the best of me._

Restraints—shackles snapping into place, bolted down around her forearms, her calves, leather strap tightening around her neck. Dark skin—hot hands at her palm where it burns, where her fever has twined its gossamer steel-strong wires through her veins until they have knotted thicker than blood.

"No good," Peris says from underwater, his face turned behind him. "It's too deep to cleanse. I can't save it."

Nys's face, moon-bright, mad-bright eyes, haloed by stars. "Take it, then. I won't lose her yet."

She knows what that means—even through this red-stained haze she _knows what that means_ , and suddenly the world's air is too thin, her chest heaving for breath that does not come, Fenris shouting wordlessly in her ears, her eyes rolling sightless and blind for rescue, for reprieve, for anything, anything, _anything—!_

Carver reaches out his hand.

She stares at him where he stands on her left side, unnoticed by the whirling wind-whipped Tides around her. His face is very calm. His eyes are sad.

"Will you stay?" she asks him, a child's voice.

He smiles, reaches down, touches her numb fingers. "Until it's over, sister."

"Okay," she gasps, and closes her eyes. "Okay."

His hand closes around hers. She welcomes that pressure, yearns for more even as his grip tightens harder, harder, to the point of pain and past it, her knuckles crushing together under the strength of her brother's fingers. Someone draws a blade at her left—she can hear the shirring of steel on leather, and then a touch as soft as rainfall halfway up her forearm—

The sudden deep breath of muscle tensing—

"Hold on," she whispers to Carver, to Fenris. To herself.

Then the blade splits down the air and takes her hand with it, and there is nothing more to hold on to.

—

Hawke is dying, and there is nothing Fenris can do to stop it.

She can no longer rise. Her raving worsens with each passing hour. When she sees him, she knows him—and he is pitifully grateful for that—but more and more frequently she speaks to ghosts and specters instead: her dead sister, her absent brother, incoherent rambling punctuated by bouts of laughter that leave her shaking. The stump of her left arm she keeps tucked close to her chest, picking with her fingernails at the red-stained bandage wrapped around the end of it. Her eyes are nearly vanished into her skull, sunken as they are, and the yellowing bruises have only darkened the fresher ones by comparison.

Dying—and a corpse already.

"Fenris?" Hawke murmurs, and his head whips around—but she is staring at the empty space to her left, a vacant pleasantness in her face, and his heart sinks again. "He's—a good man. Gentler than he looks. You'll meet him when we get to Kirkwall."

"Hawke—" he starts, his stomach twisting, but her conversation does not include him, and she does not answer.

"Don't stare. He doesn't like it when people gape."

Fenris pushes to his feet, unable to bear it, and paces the length of his cage as Hawke rambles on. He knows this walk too well—has made it a thousand times too often in the past six days. Six steps long, three wide, seven from corner to corner. Hay strewn too thin on the stone. A dented bucket in a corner, twice-emptied, useless as a weapon but for the stench.

He cannot kill thirty-eight armed men and women at once.

His forehead comes to rest against the bars between his hands, defeated again by the same numbers that have bested him for six days. Thirty-eight Tides between Hawke and freedom, and him with maybe a handful of lives' worth of lyrium left in his veins. Hawke has bought him time with her suffering, with Nys's revenge; and every precious minute she has given him always comes back to hopeless numbers. Thirty-eight—and him.

He would die for her, if he could. That penance he knows he deserves for this; that price he is willing to pay—one day. But Hawke cannot rise and cannot run and above all else she must live through this, and if he is not the one to carry her from this place there is no one else to do so, and so for that, for now—he must live.

One day.

"You look particularly…" Hawke says suddenly, then sighs, "despondent."

 _Her_ voice. Fenris turns to see her on her back, one knee bent, her eyes fever-dazzled but focused on him as they have not in hours. Her left arm is still on her chest; her right hand still plucks at the bandage around it. He says, "You're awake."

"So are you. What are you doing?"

He looks at his bolted door, at the pair of pitiless guards patrolling just beyond it. "Counting steps."

"Have they changed yet?"

"Not that I see," he murmurs, then winces. "Forgive me. I mean—"

"Flames," Hawke says, interrupting him, and something like the ghost of a smile passes over her face. "It must be bad if you're pretending to be optimistic."

The words are on his tongue even so, but Hawke knows him better than anyone ever has, and in this place above all others he will not lie to her.

He says, quietly, "I cannot save you, Hawke."

"Not with that attitude, certainly."

"You make too light of this."

"I can if I want," she says sharply. Her fingers at the bandage keep picking, picking, picking.

"Of course," Fenris says, and turns his back to the bars.

"Don't do that. Don't shut me out."

Panic in her voice, and fear— "I'm not," he tells her, twisting to kneel by her shoulders so quickly he nearly stumbles. "Hawke. It's only—"

Only what? Only six days of impotent rage, of watching the one thing in this world that he cherishes be beaten and bruised and maimed for his sake, for the sake of another woman's dead son, for the empty, pitiable revenge of too many lost souls.

"It's all right," she says quietly, and then she smiles.

And that is enough.

"I will try," he says at last. "Tomorrow. Sunset."

He cannot miss the sudden light behind her eyes, the yearning hope that trembles through her voice. "Will you?"

"Yes."

"Will you take me with you?"

"Yes."

"And if I can't—and if they—you'll run?"

His eyes clench shut; his heart squeezes tight as a knotted fist. "Yes."

"Yes," Hawke breathes, her face white as chalk, her smile beatific. "It will be _over_."

His heart stopped inside his chest or beyond it, no cry, no fanfare, no matter one way or the other. For her it will be over.

It is the only thing he can give her now.

"Oh!" Hawke says, startled, and Fenris glances up to see her staring at the red bandage around her arm, at the red cloth wrapped around his wrist. "Look. Look. We match."

And she lifts her arm straight above her like a broken flag, laughing, until the tears run like silvered rain-streaks down her temples.


	6. Chapter 6

Something is happening.

The noise of movement wakes Fenris from his uneasy sleep just before dawn. The sky through the cave-mouth is still dark and thick with the promise of rain, but even with that little light he can see the Tides flurrying with anxiety, men and women strapping swords and shields to their backs as others reach for their helmets. Nys he cannot find in the crowd but Mick stands near the cages, two others with him in close conference, voices low but not low enough to hide their open worry.

Then Nys is there, and Fenris's heart leaps to see the lines around her mouth deep with doubt. "A group of them," he hears her say. "Three, maybe four. Coming up the path. They looked armed—" Her voice drops after that, but it is enough to have him backing away from the bars, glancing at Hawke where she lies sleeping, testing muscles and lyrium barely used in the last week for their strength.

At last, with a sharp gesture and a word, Mick peels away and heads for the mouth of the cave, naked serrated daggers in both hands. Five men follow him—then ten—then fifteen.

Eighteen.

Nys has cut their force in half.

A wild laugh bubbles up the back of Fenris's throat. The whole of the group he cannot take, but half? _Half?_

He will wipe them from the face of Thedas.

Fenris rolls his weight to the balls of his feet as the last of the departing force vanishes into the night. Every nerve in his body hums; every tendon in his forearms flexes as he spreads and fists his hands in turn. The cavern looks emptier than it should with only half its occupants gone, but in a few moments it will be even emptier. He will see to that. His lyrium is still untested and might yet still fail him—but there will be no more waiting, not for him. Not for Hawke. His mouth is dry with anticipation, with long-kept white fury.

Two or three of the remaining Tides linger at the mouth of the cave, looking out at the dawn-grey sea; two groups of four and five by firepits; a pair in the back shadows, talking quietly; Peris; Nys.

Their guard, key at his waist, passing before the iron-barred door of his cell.

The grating is too tightly spaced for any but a child's hand to reach between it past its wrist, but in this moment Fenris is no mortal thing. A ghost reaches _through_ the bars with silver fire flickering up its veins; a specter fueled by rage snaps the guard's neck without a sound save the crack of small bones.

He lowers the man's body to the ground silently, grips the keys and yanks the ring from his belt. There are only three there; luck finds him now of all times and the first one he tries in his lock fits, turning as smoothly as if Varric himself has greased the pins.

His door swings open for the first time in seven days.

Fenris is loose.

There is no hesitation, no nerve-shivering second for him to comprehend the enormity of this moment, no breath to take before the wild-screaming world of battle and blood and death catches him up again, tender and close-welcoming after his long absence. He simply _moves_.

Fenris goes for the nearest firepit first. Two of them are dead before they realize what comes at them from the shadows; the third falls with her warning turned to blood in her mouth. The next Tides manage to gain their feet but it does them little good; his close-fisted punch catches the first man in the mouth and while he reels back Fenris turns to the other, snarling, every mark of lyrium in his skin alight in white flame. The woman shrieks and leaps at him, her hands empty—and he remembers her now, this one who liked the way coal burned—he steps sideways and she stumbles forward. His elbow comes down hard between her shoulder-blades and she falls the rest of the way into the smoldering campfire; she shrieks again, this time from agony, and Fenris bares his teeth in a feral smile.

The first man comes at him again, one hand cupped over his broken nose—and falls, heartless. Fenris plucks the man's sword from his nerveless fingers and turns on his heel, keeping his back to Hawke's cage, his feet close to Hawke, and faces the Tides as they come in.

It is a massacre.

He knew it would be. Seven days of stalking an iron cage; seven days of watching another take blows to keep him safe. He, of all people, he who was _created_ to be the perfect weapon, the tool built to guard a mage at all costs—guarded himself by a mage with no magic. Unacceptable.

 _Intolerable_.

He refirms his grip on his stolen sword, tests its weight as it fells another before him. A cheap blade, made with many others from a flawed mold—but enough to serve his purpose, and as he ducks under an arrow and thrusts it forward— _sharp_.

_How to Care for Your Longsword: Never touch the sharp end of the blade. There, Fenris. That's useful._

He shoves Hawke's voice from his mind. Enough time to remember that later; other, hotter memories fork lightning-sharp behind his eyes instead: the way this one laughed as Hawke begged; the way this one beat the breath from her; the way this one curled his hand around her throat until the skin bruised.

Three of them come at him at once, hoping for advantage by numbers. He recognizes one of them as a mage, one of the maleficarum so regularly stripping him of his lyrium; that one is a _pleasure_ to kill, the man's voice vanishing upward into a sharp scream as Fenris tears his heart loose from his ribs. The other two fall swiftly to his borrowed sword despite their proficiency with their own. No mercy, not for these things. They do not deserve it.

A shout rises behind him. Fenris swivels on his heel, brings the blade down in a smooth slice without hesitation. Peris stares at him, blinks twice, slowly, and touches one hand to the blood-edged gouge on his neck.

Fenris does not wait for the man to fall. He turns again, checking the greatsword swinging up towards his chin with his own blade, and hears the thump of the body on stone behind him. So few left, he thinks, ramming his elbow into the gut of the woman with the greatsword, following it with a downswinging blow to the back of her neck. So few. Too many.

He loses count of them, in the end. There are so many corpses by his feet that his enemies stumble over them more than once, boot-heels skidding on blood-slick stone. Some of them catch him despite this with fists and blades alike; one slits his jerkin along his ribs and another nocks the bone of his cheek with a dagger-tip—but it does not matter, these little things, not in the face of what Hawke has suffered and not when he cannot feel it beneath the blackening anger that grips his sword's pommel, driving it into another stomach, reaching with crooked fingers for another heart, blazing the lyrium up his arms.

No Justice possessing him, here; no such excuse. He knows himself well enough for this.

This demon is rage.

Suddenly there are no more. His sword comes down in empty space, the blade notched where it had caught on a pair of daggers. There are only bodies before him, bloodied and laid open, unmoving, unbreathing—and the sound of a footfall at his back.

He turns.

Nys stands at the door to Hawke's cage. She faces away from him, her left arm lifted to drive the long narrow shaft of her spear through the grating to the place where Hawke lies huddled on the stone—

But there is a ghost behind her, and those who are dead fear nothing from the living.

Sword abandoned, Fenris wraps both hands around the wooden end of the spear just as Nys begins to jerk it forward. Her palm slides loose on the haft from the unexpected resistance; she starts to turn and Fenris yanks the spear free, momentum carrying them both, spinning the bladed end around his back and forward again as he guides it until he can grasp the spear with both hands—

Nys draws in a breath—

—and the spear-head drives upward, hard, into the space beneath her ribs.

She hangs there a moment, her eyes wide and staring down at him. The force of the blow has sent the spear wholly through her, its hooked blade-edges protruding from her back between the bars. Fenris steps away, lets go, and the spear-head catches on the iron grating to suspend the weight of her in space.

"Bastard," Nys says at last, her gasping laugh almost silent, and she wraps her hand around the haft-wood where it meets her skin. "The circle never ends, does it?"

He says nothing.

Her head rolls down on her shoulders, her close-cropped hair made blacker with shadow. One of her ears has been cut nearly as short as a human's—he must have fought her earlier without realizing. She says, "It was worth it."

Nineteen people dead, Hawke maimed, Hawke dying—

" _Nothing_ is worth this," Fenris snarls.

Nys looks up, turns her face to the mouth of the cavern where there are no stars, no moonbeams—only a pale grey dawn and the quiet hush of a beginning rain.

"She will remember my son," she says softly, and Nys dies.

Fenris stands, stares—and then he spits at her feet and tears the ring of keys free from the door of his cell. He cannot find the right key for Hawke's door; his hands shake hard enough that the keys will not fit in the lock, will not turn when he tries. At last—at _last_ one of them turns, and the lock clicks, and then he is in Hawke's cell and he is there, _with Hawke,_ on his knees at her side where he belongs, his trembling fingers on her arms, her shoulders, her cheeks, drying blood flaking off them both.

"Hawke," he says, cupping her cheeks for the first time in seven days, feeling her breathe for the first time in seven days, bending close so that he can lift her head to rest on his arm, against his heaving chest. Her eyelids flutter but do not open. He says her name again; this time she draws in a breath but she still does not wake, not really, not even when he gathers her in his arms and lifts her from the floor. Her hair is dirty with blood and oil, lank around her crooked nose and still-swollen eye; enough dirt lines the creases of her skin and tattered robe to make them of one color with each other, as if the earth itself has tried to hide away her bruises and burns. She weighs less than he remembers.

His heart _hurts_.

They are at the mouth of the cave when she stirs. Fenris pauses just shy of the rain, his pulse hammering as she looks up, shapes her mouth into something like his name, no voice behind it. She licks split lips with a dry tongue, tries again. "Where are we?"

"Leaving."

"You won?"

"Only against some."

She reaches up with the arm that has no hand. "You're—bleeding."

He snorts a maddened laugh, shakes his head, shifts her weight until he can replace her arm over her chest. He does not let himself linger. "There may be more. Be still."

She nods, a child's confidence, and closes her eyes.

Fenris steps into the rain, shoulders curved over Hawke, death behind him: a dawn with no light.

—

He knows this part of the Wounded Coast, the rock-choked slopes familiar even in the weather. Kirkwall lies straight to the east, no more than an hour's walk, and if there is even the smallest shred of mercy left in the Maker's eyes they will make it there unscathed. Unscathed _further_ , he amends to himself, and Hawke turns her head so that her twice-broken nose does not press against his neck.

He wishes he'd kept the longsword—but he will not take Hawke back into that place again and he will not leave her to fetch one, and instead he begins to make his way down the path that leads eastward. It is rough going, the sand sodden and sliding under his feet, the grey-lightening sky behind the rain throwing odd shadows and glimmers on storm-soaked stone, making him doubt more than once whether the ground will hold them both or simply give way. Worse, he is exhausted—the rush of battle and spent anger will keep him upright only so long, and even with Hawke taking his blows his lyrium is weak and he has not eaten well in seven days.

Fenris shakes his head sharply, scatters rain-drops from the ends of his hair. Long enough. He will move—long enough.

Without warning, a child-sized chunk of sand breaks loose from the trail under his foot. His bare heels dig hard into the sand, skidding downwards three feet—four—five—and then Fenris sits down hard to check the fall, Hawke's weight jolting into his lap as he tries to keep them both from the Waking Sea that churns slate-dark beneath them. She gasps at the impact to her broken ribs, gasps again as he starts to stand; then she clenches her good hand—her only hand—into a fist.

"This is stupid, Carver," she says. "We'll never get to the farm if you keep this up."

He does not flinch. He does not. "My apologies."

"Just put me on your back. At least that way you'll have a hand free if you need it."

He does not respond. He only helps her to her knees, kneels himself before her—and when her weight falls against his back, her arms—one handed, one not—draped over his shoulders, he curls his fingers under her scarred thighs and pushes to his feet.

Hawke whispers, aghast, "There isn't a way out of here, is there?"

"There is," Fenris tells her. "You will be home soon."

"There isn't," she breathes, and then she buries her face in his neck as he starts the descent again, and her tears run hot into his collar, down his spine.

Fenris lets her be, and after a few moments the weeping comes to a close as she forgets the cause of it. She stays quiet, though, and does not move much, and Fenris cannot pretend he is not glad of her silence with uncertain enemies still ahead. Her weight _is_ easier to carry this way, too; he needs his hands twice on the steepest parts of the path, once saving them from falling only by the tips of his fingers and a jutting boulder slick with rainwater, but after some time they come at last to a leveler place where the trail splits. No footprints remain of Mick's group gone ahead, not with the drizzle roughening the sand, and after a moment's deliberation Fenris takes the east-leading trail. He cannot let himself be eaten by doubt, not now; he can only move forward.

Ten steps down the path, though, the wind abruptly changes—and brings with it the sound of battle. The fighting is straight ahead and not far; he grits his teeth and moves ahead, carefully, close to the cliffs beside him as he dares, ready at a heartbeat's notice to flee back the way they have come if need demands it.

Then he rounds the corner, and Fenris finds he cannot move at all.

They have come.

Isabela is— _here_ , and Anders is here, and Merrill, all three of them soaked to the bone and hard-eyed, hard-knuckled hands tight around their staves and knives as they wipe the last of Mick's group from the living. Mick himself kneels on the near side of a scatter of rocks, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes turned away from the last of his men as they die.

So lost is he to shock that Fenris cannot even move, every muscle in his body clenched to the point of pain. It is not until Hawke makes a low noise in her throat that he realizes how tightly he is gripping her legs; it is not until he forces himself to take two stiff stilting steps towards them that Isabela swings away from her dead foes to face them in a low crouch, her daggers raised through a spray of rainwater, and—stops.

Eyes wide, she says, "Fenris—" but it is Merrill who puts the name to it, Merrill who stumbles forward with lightning dying around her hands and breathes, _"Hawke._ "

Fenris licks dry lips, struggling for words, struggling for sense in a mind suddenly swallowed with roaring. "Mage," he manages, and half-kneels, half-falls into sodden sand, Hawke's weight sliding limp from his back. "Anders. Help."

But Anders is already there, hands blazing blue, skin cracking at the corners of his eyes until the air burns with the Fade. Between the two of them they lower Hawke to her back on the sand; Merrill pulls a thin broad arc of stone from the ground over their heads in a makeshift shelter from the rain.

Mick lets out a soft, sharp laugh where he kneels. "So this is how it ends, Hessarian?"

Fenris's head snaps up. Mick's eyes are on him, glaring, mocking—and Fenris finds a hoarse facsimile of his own voice. "That one. Kill him."

"You can't. You couldn't even kill your Champion when she _begged_ you for it; you won't kill a prisoner in cold blood."

He says it simply, as if there is no question of it, and thunder booms low in the distance over the Waking Sea. Fenris has already half-risen from his knees; now he thrusts his open hand at Isabela, ignoring the rain sliding down his cheeks and hers like tears, impatient, blind with white rage. "A blade—give me a blade."

Merrill looks up, her hands arrested where she holds a bandage to Hawke's wrist. "He surrendered when he saw us."

"Give me a _blade_!" Fenris shouts, blood pounding like drums in his ears, and when Isabela holds out the wet hilt of her dagger with a measured look he tears it from her hand. From there it is four short steps to where Mick kneels, one hand on his jaw to hold him still, one quick breath while he stares openmouthed at the elf lunging at him—

And Mick falls dead, dagger-blade piercing through his throat to pin him to the sand.

Fenris puts one callused heel on the hilt, drives the dagger deeper into the earth, the sand beneath him puddling with both water and blood. No more gentle derisive laughter for this one, not now; no more pretenses of kindness shadowing naked brutality.

_Save the elf's life? Persuade me._

He should have let him linger.

But Anders calls him, worried and strained, and Fenris forces the anger back in his mind to something more quiescent for now. They are not home yet; Hawke still needs him, and Anders needs him, and the exhaustion running with the lines of his bones must wait a while longer.

He yanks the dagger free, wipes the flat of the blade on his rain-stained thigh, hands it back to Isabela without a word. She follows him to Merrill's makeshift lean-to, silently, and as he ducks under its doubtful shelter he finds himself grateful for her understanding. Comfort is unwelcome now, and platitudes unendurable, and when Fenris drops heavily beside Hawke he lets out a long, noiseless breath at the sight of her where she lies, white, broken, all doll-limbs and no strength. Anders's eyes are half-lidded and sparking blue; his hands glow hot enough to steam the air around them. Isabela, hard-faced, stands next to Merrill who is pale with concern, her hands clenched at her own elbows.

Hawke's eyes are closed. She does not move.

"Hold on," Fenris tells her quietly, permitting himself one brief touch to her hollowed, fever-burnt cheek.

Rescue.


	7. Chapter 7

Her face is wet.

At first Hawke thinks she has been crying again; then she realizes her hair is wet too, and her clothes, and her hands—hand—all dripping with water and she can't remember—have they put her to the too-deep cistern again? But no, someone is holding her—touching her shoulder, her ribs where they are broken, her ankle where it is blackened with swelling.

"Are you going to lie there all afternoon?" Bethany asks, peering over Anders's shoulder. Hawke opens her eyes the rest of the way, opens her mouth—or tries to, but her lips are numb and clumsy and the words swell inside her tongue. Bethany shakes her head, untouched by the rain that patters down her shoulders, and puts a finger to her lips. "Don't let out the flood, sister."

_Flood of what,_ Hawke wants to ask, but even as the thought forms she can feel the pain seeping back beneath her skin, half-forgotten bruises rising to swallow the cracked ribs in her chest, the finger-marks lacing the skin of her throat, her twice-broken nose throbbing under the thrum of magic. It hurts—it _hurts—_

Her father lifts his head across the golden field, shading his eyes the same color as the grain, his edges wavering with heat. "Don't fight him," he says, and though he is so far away she can barely see him his voice carries with the winds, piercing her heart and lodging there: wound and salve at once. "You've held on so long, my girl. You've only got a little way still to go."

"I can't," Hawke says, thinks she says, the words twisting in her mouth, and even when the golden grain-stalks go up in lightning and flame and the sky turns storm-green above her there is no choice but to stand in the rising flood-waters, to lift her head for one last desperate gasp of air before the magic crushes over her again.

"Magebane," Fenris tells Anders. His voice is as unsteady as the sky. "It was in her hand—"

Anders curses, and lightning strikes blue-white sparks down the cracks of his cheek. Bethany laughs and turns away, twirling her staff around one hand, touching the fingers of the other to her hair where it is reddened with blood. Her lips move with words as she glances back and Anders's voice comes out instead, saying something about the Fade as if it _matters_ , and Bethany fades, fades—

"It's worked into her blood with the infection. This is bad. I don't have enough—"

"Take this."

"Fenris—"

" _Take it!"_

And the air bursts into flames around her, the fire white and cold like the burning of mountain peaks, racing down her throat and veins to kill her from the inside out. She gasps for air, yawns her mouth open to beg with no voice, and then—

It is dark.

When she opens her eyes again she is in the back of her father's buck wagon, rumbling and bumping over the half-rutted road that leads to West Hill. Carver is asleep beside her, all youth and gangly limbs; she has fallen across a sack of grain in her sleep like a cut-string puppet, and somehow she cannot find the strength to lift herself away from it. She draws in a breath, lets it out again, feels the slow trickling of water down her temple to the hollow beneath her jaw as she looks to where her father sits at the reins. "Is there…" she begins; then the cart shifts with the wet sand and she loses her thought. Eventually she asks instead, "Where are we going?"

"Home," her father tells her softly, twitching the reins without waking Carver.

Hawke considers this for a long time. The distant sky rumbles with thunder and she looks eastward, curious; then lightning forks from sky to grey sea in a blown-breath burst of brilliance, and she closes her eyes. "Which one?"

"Kirkwall, Hawke," he says, and his voice is wrong again, rougher, richer, meant for someone with greener eyes—

Her hand hurts.

Carver wakes all at once like he never did in Lothering, and when he sits up he is not the child Hawke remembers from West Hill but a man, taller than her, his eyes gone serious and stern like someone who has seen death too early and too often. "I said," he tells her, "that I would stay until it was over."

"Is it over?"

He inclines his head and rain drips from the ends of his hair where it is plastered against his forehead, from the edges of the blue-hemmed uniform that holds him too close, too far away from her reach. The cart lurches alarmingly at the edge of a sudden pit in the road, and she realizes that her father no longer sits at the mule's reins. No one does.

"No," she whispers, as if it matters. "I don't like this. I don't want to be here."

"Be still, Hawke," Fenris tells her, voice too near her ear and tight with worry, and then there are arms around her to stop her struggling, not only his arms but someone else's too, someone made of salt and sea spray with the voice of the open ocean—

"There, now," says Isabela, and Hawke's eyebrows draw together. She can smell damp skin and blood—her nose, she realizes, bleeding again, and she rolls her forehead against Fenris's neck. "Good girl," Isabela adds, warm and low, and fingers brush over her cheek where the drizzle has driven her matted hair. "Just a little farther."

"Almost over," says Carver.

The grain field is burning and she cannot breathe through the smoke. Her father stands in the distance, his hand lifted in farewell. His eyes hold only fire.

—

It is not until they reach the city that she wakes again; not until voices she—knows, loves—call her name that she tries to lift eyelids kept shut with stones. A Tide passes a cold, wet hand over her cheek and she flinches, crying out—not again, not now, not _again—_ and then words spill over her with the soundless fury of a waterfall, and she can do nothing but struggle to breathe. Aveline—Varric—Sebastian—

And Fenris, pulling her through a door into darkness, into silence, into respite.

There. Enough.

Anders's voice slides gently from the darkness, up even stairs and in the slow-growing shimmer of candles lighting one after the other. "Bodahn said he started a bath."

A noise, wordless, hesitating—

"Let me." Isabela, and the cresting wave of the sea— "And go take care of yourself before you come back, sweet thing. You're almost as filthy."

A shifting in the earth beneath her, a boat's wooden hull rocking away from the shore, and—the anchor gone. Her brow furrows, relaxes, furrows again, and then Isabela's hands are on her, unknotting the robe's sash where it is stained and rusted with blood and worse, peeling back the layers of fabric where they have scabbed to her skin. She is raw beneath, stripped of herself like this, and when she opens her eyes there is something in Isabela's face, blurry and shining gold that stops her words in her throat.

"Where am I?" Hawke asks her instead, when she can speak, and hears the lapping of ripples in the cistern.

"Home," Isabela murmurs, but it is still— _not right—_ but Isabela turns her on the bench first so that her feet dip into water.

Hawke sucks in a breath—but this is _Isabela_ , sea-hearted, and she does not fight her as her weight shifts, dips beneath her knees, her shoulders, slides her in one smooth motion into a stone-walled well with—

—a well with no bottom, no hope, nothing but water and there are hands on her shoulders, in her hair, pushing her down, gripping every part of her until the bubbles escape in enormous billowing plumes from her lips, and even under the surface where she drowns she can hear the laughter of the Tides—

No! No, no, _no_ —

She does not realize she is screaming until Bethany puts her finger to her lips. "Don't let out the flood," she says again, kindly, sadly, but the river is undammed and the shore-works torn away with the frothing of it, and Hawke throws an arm towards her sister in desperation. _Help me_ , she begs, reaching with no wrist, no hand, no fingers. Only blood. _Help me. Maker. Someone. Help me!_

" _Hawke!"_ Fenris snaps. Her voice dies in her throat, throttled by terror; his hands are tight on her arms and his face is close to hers, wetter, cleaner than it was, shoulders bare and red from rough scrubbing. Isabela stands behind him, turned away, half-bent at the waist like a mast cracked by a sudden storm.

"I'm going to drown," Hawke whispers, her words shuddering out in deep gasps, and at the corners of her mouth she tastes the salt of tears.

Fenris closes his eyes, shoulders caving in like a blow has hollowed out his heart; then he turns and says something over his shoulder. Isabela's reply is low and gentle, and a moment later the door clicks closed behind her. Fenris stands, peels off his trousers, puts one warm strong hand in the center of her back—and almost before she can fathom the motion he has dropped himself into the water behind her in the bathtub—no cistern, no stone, only polished wood and a copper lining. His knees come to rest along the outside of her knees, his palms splaying one over her bare stomach, one at the base of her throat just above where the water laps. His hands tremble as badly as hers.

"Breathe," he tells her, voice trembling too, and the words rumble through her spine, dip into the pit of her belly. She closes her eyes and tries to fill her lungs, and even though they come only half-full it is a better breath than the ones before, and Fenris hums a low note of approval. "Again," he says, and then, "again," and once more as she eases, quietly, "again."

Across the room, Bethany smiles.

They sit like this for a long time. Eventually Fenris begins to move, lathering a cloth with cake soap and slowly, carefully pulling it through the dirt in her skin. She does not have so many open wounds as she remembers—something pricks her, something about magic, and Fade-splitting voices telling her to hold on—but the thought is gone before she can pin it, and between the motion of the cloth and the hand on her stomach still holding her together she manages to scrape up something like calm.

_Hold on_.

One by one her muscles unknot, bits of rust and dried blood flaking off her skin with every draw of the cloth. She watches it for a while as it moves over her stomach, her breasts, her shoulders, fascinated by the magic of clean skin emerging beneath the filth. Fenris is very gentle, gentler than she had expected; his chest rises and falls against her bruised spine in slow, even motions, tugging her own breathing after it like a seabird caught in a ship's wake. She is alive only in glances of touch and sound: his knees sliding against hers with the water; the muscles of his forearms and naked thighs and stomach tightening and relaxing as he reaches forward and down into the bath and forward again; his fingers twisting the cloth to wring water over her hair. She blinks lazily, watching the lyrium bend and straighten with each movement, listening to the quiet drip from the ends of her hair, the soft lapping of elf-made ripples as they strike the edges of the tub. He smells like sweat and blood and the aggressive cleanliness of the soap.

She knows she smells worse.

The water is so much dirtier now than it was, nearly opaque, a thin line of grime marking the copper lining of the tub in a perfect ring. Fenris notices it the same time she does; in short, smooth motions he lifts her from the tub and helps her lie on the bench beneath a great towel, drains the filthy water, helps Bodahn and Sandal bring in new bucketfuls until the tub is full and clean and steaming hot again. Bodahn kisses her forehead; Sandal pats her cheek and whispers something she cannot understand. Then they are gone, and Fenris's arms are around her again, steady and warm, and if this time when he steps with her into the bath she grips him too tightly, she does not drown beneath the fear.

Fenris does not seem to mind, though, and even if Hawke minded she could not ease her grasp—so she ignores it, savoring the warmth, not drowning—not being drowned. Fenris settles her against his chest again, his knees along hers, pulling away from her only once to clean her back—and the loss she feels there would humiliate her in another life—but he keeps his arm tight on her shoulders and around her waist, holding her steady, anchoring her, and for that little time—that is enough.

She asks the question before she realizes the words are on her tongue. "Is my sister here?"

He tenses against her, a rope pulled taut without warning; then he pulls her back to his warm breathing chest, the fingers of one hand held carefully to her cheek as he begins to wipe her face. He says, "No."

Hawke looks to where her sister leans against the wall by the door, younger now, her hands laced behind her back as she rocks her weight to her heels. "I'm sick," she says at last, and Bethany nods, and the realization is a sigh of wind pulling the terror from her chest in a long thin black stream. She breathes again with Fenris as he breathes, and once more, and when he pulls her knees towards him so that he can reach her feet she lets herself lean fully back, head lolling on his shoulder, boneless between his hands and the warmth of the water.

Bethany is not here. Bethany is dead. Nys's son is dead—and Nys. Her father is dead; her mother is dead; her brother is alive and buried already. No reason to hold on. No reason.

Fenris does not question her tears. Hawke is grateful for that, grateful too that he does not touch her arm where it is bandaged at the end with Anders's pristine wrappings, grateful that he does not ask her if she will be all right. She turns her face into his neck without speaking and weeps until she has no more strength for it.

He stiffens at the beginning; then his arms tighten around her as if to stop her breath, his knees drawing up as if to cover her from this world that has so damaged her by will alone. He presses his eyes to her wet hair, his nose to her temple, his mouth to the bone of her cheek, and when at last he begins to whisper foreign words into her skin his voice is as tremulous as old glass, rippling and wavering around the syllables, his breath thready and thin between its cracks.

They neither of them move for a long time, and even after the bathwater has begun to cool, the wetness in her hair keeps hot.

Later, when Fenris has rinsed them both and lifted her from the last filthy remnants of the cave on the Wounded Coast and Anders has touched his fingers to the places where she still bleeds, still swells, still has no fingers of her own, Hawke finds herself at last on something soft and cool and welcoming.

A bed. _Her_ bed. A week in Tide-swell and iron and she does not even recognize it. Some things, she thinks muzzily, run too deep to wash away so easily.

A struck match flares with light, gives way to the gentler glow of a candle. Chair-legs slide across a rug to settle near the edge of the bed; Orana's soft, sweet voice accompanies the rustle of a blanket changing hands.

The door clicks shut and after a long, lingering moment, Fenris sighs her name. Fingers ghost over her brow, her cheek, the hollow of her throat where her pulse beats; lips touch briefly to her forehead. She can barely open her eyes, but Hawke looks to the door where a fading figure stands slim and tall and proud.

Bethany snaps her staff over her knee. A quick shot of flame billows upward, bright and hot as a star; then it vanishes into smoke, and Bethany smiles. "This passes too, sister," she tells her, and Hawke sleeps.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! I ended up adding an extra scene here, and I had to find a chance to write it.

 

Part Three

 

—

And see how the flesh grows back  
across a wound, with a great vehemence,  
more strong  
than the simple, untested surface before.  
There's a name for it on horses,  
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,  
is proud of its wounds, wears them  
as honors given out after battle,  
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other  
see how it is like a  
scar between their bodies,  
stronger, darker, and proud;  
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric  
that nothing can tear or mend.

— _For What Binds Us,_ Jane Hirschfield

—

Orana does not like this silence. It is cold and hard and terrible and full of the weight of many sorrows, and it brings too near her mind the memory of another time, another silence, this same house and a crueler emptiness without the mistress's mother there. Some might think it better here, now that the mistress has survived—but Orana knows better, knows when she sees the white face with closed, bruised eyelids and arms marred by broken bones and the red marks of knife and whip—that survival is not the only end.

How strange that a week could feel the length of a lifetime, she thinks as she makes her way up the stairs to the mistress's bedroom, as if her ancestors had only kept secret the ways of the undying for moments of great fear and great worry. She still remembers as if only moments had passed the diamond-spray of glass that had crunched beneath the opening study door, the horrible smell of fresh blood and sweat washing over her as if she stood again in the slave-halls of Minrathous, the absolute wreck of scattered books and broken furniture and upended end-tables—and her mistress gone, and Fenris gone, no word and no sign of victory left behind.

And then—the longest week she can remember. All of the mistress's friends had gathered here after that first alarm: the tall guard-captain sifting through the pages left blowing in the open window's breeze, the elf-girl reaching to touch the scarred boot-marks on the stone sill; the warm smiling dwarf kneeling to pull a gold-fletched arrow from its place embedded in the stained floor. He had not been smiling then.

And because they were warriors with warriors' minds and warriors' wills, they had convened for battle, all of them collected in the one small ruined study as if to bring sword and shield to the empty bookcases, to the window that would no longer latch. Bodahn and Sandal had still not returned; and so because Orana had seen the way of things better than the blood-driven men and women in her mistress's home she had quietly slipped away to the kitchens. There she had made sandwiches, small quick things with no fuss that did not mind her crying, and poured glasses of water and wine with trembling hands, and when she was finished she'd returned to the study with a laden tray and heavier heart. Without a word she'd cleared a place on the low, ruined table before the sofa and placed the tray there, ignoring and ignored by the voices that argued and shouted and fought around her, over her; and when she'd seen that there was nothing more to be gained from the room's destruction, without a word she'd fetched broom and pan and begun to clean.

It had grieved her, gathering together the broken pieces of her mistress's delicate glass lamp; it had made her weep to scrub at the blood that seeped beneath the dark-wood stain of the floorboards. But she'd known her place and she'd known her work, and while the rest of Hawke's companions spoke of war she'd turned to what she knew better: of returning the mistress's home to—a _home_ , and not a battleground. She could do so little.

She could do this.

Orana doesn't know who had been the first to fall silent, the first to move to help her. She only knows that she'd realized all at once the room had gone quiet and she'd turned—and the healer had been righting tables, and the sea-captain had been collecting books, and the archer-prince had been levering the bookshelves to their home against the wall again.

She'd wept a little then, and a little more that night when Bodahn and Sandal had come home at last to an empty home and emptier explanations, and again the next morning when she'd realized that it was no dream, that her mistress was missing and not safe and Fenris was missing with her. But weeping solved few problems and grief solved precious fewer, and so Orana had put away her tears and her sorrow and taken out her apron instead. She could not help Hawke home; so she would feed those who could, and carry maps and messages, and speak to the woodworker and the merchant who imported furniture and the glass-blower who was fond of sweet buns, repairing the things that were broken and replacing those that could not be made whole again. Little things. Necessary things.

She has never been meant for great deeds, Orana thinks, arranging the sprig of white flowers in their little vase, but she has never minded caring for those who are.

As she does now, knocking quietly on the mistress's half-closed door. It swings out the rest of the way at her touch, oiled and silent, and she slips into the curtain-dimmed room just as silently, her bare toes sinking into the plush carpet, her tray balanced against one hip. Even in the dimness she can see that the mistress has neither moved nor woken.

Fenris has not moved either. His head still lies heavy on the crook of his elbow where it is propped on Hawke's bed, the coverlet crumpled under his weight; his other hand has fallen in his lap, half-curled, as if he had wished to reach for something and could not find the courage. The wooden armchair he sits in perches askance to the bed, twisting his back at an awkward angle, and Orana winces in sympathy as he strains in his sleep for a too-shallow breath. The sleeping clothes she'd found for him had belonged to the mistress's brother first—they are too large for Fenris, the already-wide neck hanging low and loose on narrow shoulders made narrower by torture and starvation, the sleeves rolled to his elbows only marking the atrophy of strength and vigor that she has always, always associated with Fenris, even in the first days when she feared him.

Now he is only scraped thin. Now—he only carries sorrow. She does not fear him now.

Orana sets the tray on her mistress's nightstand between the healer's roll of unused bandages and a vial of amber laudanum. Wood knocks gently against wood and she glances over her shoulder, expecting movement—but even now Fenris does not wake, his eyes clenched shut, the lids flickering as he struggles in some terrible dream. Without much hesitation she reaches out, touches him gently on the shoulder where the undyed linen slides loose over effort-roughened lines of lyrium.

He blinks, slowly, and comes awake. There is no sudden jerk of startlement, no moment of terror and confusion to jeopardize her life; instead his eyes draw into focus on her eyes, and then onto the tray of tea and cheese and buttered bread that lies steaming gently behind her, and then they close again, and Fenris sighs.

"Good morning," Orana tells him softly, unnecessarily. "I have brought breakfast."

He pushes away from the bed, straightening the too-tense muscles along his spine where they have been twisted. "I am not hungry."

A lie and an obvious one, Orana thinks, but she does not push. Instead she reaches down to brush the mistress's unkempt hair from her forehead, arranging it neatly behind her short, stubby human ears, and bites her lip. "Has anything—happened?"

"No," Fenris says, his eyes closing again. "She has not woken. She has—said nothing."

Orana sighs, touches Hawke's hair again for no more reason than to comfort her—to comfort _herself_. "It cannot be long now."

"No," Fenris says again, and even as he says the word Hawke draws in a sudden, sharp breath.

They both of them startle, Orana snatching back her hand, Fenris half-rising from his chair and leaning forward, green eyes pinched with something too anxious for hope. He says, "Hawke?"

But Hawke does not wake, does not shift again save the hard furrow of her eyebrows—and the slow steady trickling of tears from beneath her clenched eyelids. "Fenris," she whispers, and the word is a curse and an accusation in one. "Help me. Bastard. _Help me_."

Orana looks to him, uncomprehending—and then reaches for him all at once because he is _white,_ his eyes wide, his lips pale, his hands shaking as they reach blindly for support he cannot find. She catches one elbow clumsily, braces it as best she can; this time when Hawke curses she is ready for the shudder that rocks through him, ready for the hard-knuckled fist that thumps into the bedspread and clenches there. "Help me," Hawke pleads, voice breaking, mind breaking, and at the unheard answer her tears start fresh again. "Why not?" she asks, and beside Orana Fenris turns his head away from them both. "Why not? Please. Fenris— _please._ "

"Mistress," Orana starts, but her throat catches on the word and she has to swallow to hear it. "Mistress, wake up."

And Hawke does, her eyes flying open, wide and startled and unseeing, blank with memory's despair.

They both flinch. The movement draws Hawke's gaze, still glassy and bright with fever; her eyes drift over them both without purpose and without sight, and when Fenris bends over her, helplessly, drawn like a line has pulled him, she shuts her eyes again and turns away.

"Hawke," Fenris breathes.

"Just go," she whispers, and he jerks back as if she has struck him. "If you won't help me—then leave me alone."

He sucks in a thin breath through his teeth—and then before Orana can say a word he has torn away from them both, unsteady steps carrying him to the door before she can stop him, before she can even think to turn and follow. "Wait," she says, too late, too softly—and with a gentle click, the door closes behind him.

Orana stares, frustrated, bewildered, mired in grief and sorrow and the useless prick of tears. She swallows hard, and then again until the lump in her throat has dislodged, and when she is once again master of herself she turns and perches gently on the bedside by her mistress. "Sleep," she murmurs, passing her hand over her mistress's brow, smoothing the lines from the corners of her eyes and sweeping away the tears, stroking her hair until she falls into her restless quiet once more. She can do so little, she once-slave, she still-lost—but—she can do this.

On the nightstand, quietly, the forgotten tea begins to cool.

—

Aveline raps her knuckles hard on the door for the third time in as many minutes, and as before there is no response. She waits a moment more until even her patience has ended, and when still no one comes she puts her hands on her hips, ignoring Donnic's pointed cough, and raises her voice to the broken windows of the upper floor. "If you don't answer, I'll knock down the door."

A long pause—long enough for Aveline to square her shoulders and take a few steps back—but before she can start systematically destroying property they hear the sound of footsteps inside, soft but growing louder, and then the latch creaks and at last the door pulls inward into dimness and shadow.

"Maker's _breath_ ," Aveline says, astonished. "You look _awful_."

And Fenris does, deep sleepless circles beneath his eyes, his shoulders bent, his mouth pressed so hard together it lines at the corners. His arms are bare from shoulder to wrist, his chest narrower without the armor; he is, to all appearances, defenseless, and that is enough to have Aveline glancing back at Donnic in concern.

"What do you want?" he asks, putting one hand to the open doorframe, and Aveline is struck again at the hoarseness of his voice, as if his throat has torn and not yet begun to heal.

"Hawke's fever broke. She finally woke up this morning—for good, this time. I didn't know if you knew."

"I know. Sebastian told me earlier."

Aveline feels her own mouth thinning. "You haven't gone to see her."

Fenris says nothing, only shifts his gaze somewhere to the left of her shoulder.

"You _haven't_. Why not?"

"Aveline," Donnic says in a low voice, and Fenris lets out a sharp sigh before pushing away from the door. They follow his bent back without speaking into the ruin of his home; when they have gained the grand hall proper Fenris gestures without turning at the single pair of wooden chairs framing the tiny wooden table at the base of the stairs. Donnic takes one without comment.

Aveline does not. "She's been asking for you all morning." Asking with a voice so rough Aveline cannot believe there is not damage left from the throttling, smiling at her and Donnic from a face as much bruises as flesh, embracing them both with one hand—only one hand. Apologizing for not rising, as if the ankle splinted and bandaged like a great overripe fruit were somehow her own fault.

"…I know."

She shakes her head roughly. "It's been three days since you two came back. You've been holed up in here for two of them. You have to come out eventually."

"I am aware," Fenris says acidly, but he still will not look at her. Instead he hunches further into himself, the muscles in the back of his neck lining with tension.

"Then come with us."

"Not at the moment."

"Maker," Aveline snaps, glancing to Donnic. "I don't see how Hawke puts up with you sometimes."

If she had not looked back in time she would have missed Fenris's flinch—but his back is bare and his arms are bare, and for a moment there is more than that laid open before her. Then Fenris turns to look at her at last, and there is something so raw behind his eyes that Aveline cannot hold it—cannot bear to see that part of him, not when it is private and so pained. That is for Hawke, not for her—

Hawke was not the only one tortured in that place, Aveline realizes, and drops her eyes. Seven days she had paced and cursed and stabbed at Varric's maps, sending out guardsmen at all hours after even the weakest leads, furious at her own impotence. Seven days, and enough helplessness between them to make her sick.

Fenris lets out a low breath of a laugh with nothing of laughter in it, and that too is a wound too tender to touch. Aveline grits her teeth, looks up again—and this time that terrible light has been shuttered away, Fenris once more in command of himself and of his own suffering. "I will go," he says at last, "soon."

"No, you won't," she says without anger.

"You said Sebastian came by," Donnic says smoothly over the both of them, propping one elbow on the table.

"Yes. To tell me of Hawke. To explain—" his mouth twists, "—the delay."

"In the rescue, you mean."

Fenris cuts his eyes at her. "Yes."

"We came as soon as we could. We saw the wreck of Hawke's place—it just took so long for someone to come to Varric with the crest…"

"I _know_ ," he says shortly, and Aveline can hear the edge creeping back into his throat, that torn part of him splitting open again in irritation and anger. "He has returned it to me with his apologies."

"Salt in the wound, I'm sure."

For a moment he looks startled; then something near a real smile flashes across his face, there and gone again like a leaf in a dry winter wind. "His intent was appreciated."

At last, Aveline takes the chair beside Donnic. Fenris leans on the wall separating the twin staircases nearest Aveline, close enough for her to know they have not offended him, and she purses her lips again at how his cheeks have hollowed. "Anders says she'll be fine eventually. Only some scars and the broken nose. And—her hand." _That_ had been a blow sharp enough to take the air from her lungs that day in Hightown. At first she'd thought it'd been Anders, bringing back the first search party in order to send her out with the second—but instead she'd watched a filthy, wild-eyed elf stumble through the city's coastal gate with a thing in his arms that could not _possibly_ be human—and that thing had been Hawke.

Worse, Hawke as she'd never seen her, mad with fever and reaching for ghosts with a stump of an arm where a hand used to be, her nose flat and broken and her ankle mangled and one eye nearly swollen shut. There had been blood on her robe, too, at her throat and thighs and spattered down her back, old dried streaks nudging alongside newer, shinier ones, and the breath had thickened in Aveline's throat like a noose pulling a finger's width too tight.

She had seen only the aftermath. Fenris had watched it happen.

Seven _days_.

Abruptly she realizes Donnic is speaking— _has_ been speaking, asking Fenris about diamondback of all things. She opens her mouth, ready to change the subject, but Fenris smiles again at Donnic's suggestion, and nods, and something of his bleakness begins to lighten. "Next week? I have no other plans."

"Good," says Donnic, leaning back in his chair. "And don't think being ill will get you winning hands out of pity."

The noise he makes is almost—almost a laugh. "The heavens forbid."

"And maybe we can even bring Aveline along."

She hesitates—but Fenris is smiling and her husband looks at her expectantly, and at last she snorts. "I thought I got angry when I lost."

"So don't lose," Donnic suggests. "Or do, and we can pretend that Fenris is the cheerful one of the lot for once."

Aveline laughs despite herself, and Fenris shakes his head, and for a moment the manor is as unhaunted in the sunlight as it has been today, even with the thick dust floating through the shafts of sunlight and the thump of the broken chair-leg as Donnic shifts his weight. Fenris glances at her when she sighs without meaning to and she flushes—and then, because she cannot help it, her eyes go again to the hollowness of his cheeks, to the too-sharp lines of tendon in his neck. "Have you been eating, Fenris?"

He lifts an eyebrow. "Well enough."

"Which is to say," Donnic mutters under his breath, "not at all."

"I have managed before. I will manage. I am simply—not hungry."

"Of course not," Aveline says, and pushes up from the rickety wooden chair. It will do little for the shadows beneath his eyes, but— "Which is why you're coming home for lunch."

Fenris leans back, wary. "What?"

Donnic nods, standing himself, and proffers his hand to shake. "We're making beef stew, with carrots and potatoes and all sorts of non-meat things. It'll be hearty _and_ filling. With two soldiers in the house, you know it has to be."

"One meal. Then you can go—back here, or to Hawke's. Wherever. I won't push."

"No matter how much you wish to," Fenris says, mouth quirking, but Aveline will brook no argument in this, not from a soldier who doesn't know how to care for himself in times of trouble, not from a man who _should know better_ , and Fenris seems to see it in her face. He sighs, his lips twisting—and then he takes Donnic's hand, shaking it briefly, and pauses only a moment to look at them both.

He says, "Thank you."

 


	9. Chapter 9

"You know," Hawke says, her voice cutting nicely through the silence of her room, "the reason I took the potted plants away from that sill was to keep dirt _off_ it."

Varric glances at her, adjusting his booted feet more comfortably where they rest on the broad stone windowsill, and gives her his second-best winning smile. "You imply too much about these boots."

"I can _see_ their soles, Varric."

"And gold-hearted they are, aren't they? They spend so much time with me; it must rub off."

"Gold-tongued," Hawke mutters, working to keep back a small smile, but waves her good hand in the air to dismiss the argument and settles back into her pillows, opens her book again. "You can explain the extra work to Bodahn later."

Varric chuckles and makes a note in his little brown leather notebook. Hawke is in much better spirits than expected, all things considering, and save that she glances up too quickly each time the door opens he might think her simply resting for the day. That is, he amends to himself—the glances, and the wreck left of her body.

He had known from the first that she would not be the Hawke he remembered. Seven days gone and no word of ransom, no hint as to where she and Fenris might have vanished. Nowhere pleasant, they'd known that first night when Orana had burst into his room at the Hanged Man, weeping, spilling out a torrent of frantic images: broken window-glass, arrows, dead bodies, blood-spatter sprayed across a sofa. Nowhere kind. Then—nowhere at _all_ , it had seemed, when six days of bribes and messengers and runners had failed to unearth a shred of a suggestion to trace. And then, just before Anders had lit Darktown stem to stern with Justice's merciless light—and rage—at last he'd gotten word of an Antivan named Beran, an older man, a _collector_ in town to collect, furious beyond the pale at the failure of his hired band to deliver his purchase.

It had not taken long to find _him_. It had not taken Isabela long, either, to extract the details of the transaction. Then the boy from Lowtown had come with the crest and a story and an open palm, and that had found them the Coast. A starting point—and enough.

Varric suppresses a shudder. Rivaini had been _terrifying_ , angry and armed; he has no wish to see her work in that vein again anytime soon.

_In that vein_. He rolls his eyes at himself.

"You've been quiet for a while," Hawke says, and he looks back at her where she lies on the bed. The swelling has gone down around her eye, though the bones of her nose will never be straight again. Only a fine latticework of bruises still laces around her neck. He cannot see her ankle under the sheets but he knows the swelling has eased there, too—but it's her bandaged arm that catches his eye again, only for an instant, drumming guilt into his heart.

Don't stare. Broad brushstrokes first—the outline before the embellishment. The details will come later.

He will not enjoy some of these details.

"Varric?"

"Sorry," he says easily, lifting his pen from the page. "I was thinking of one of my serials."

She nods. He is glad it is so sunny and warm outside; the little lies are always easier to believe in a cheerful room. Hawke flips a few more pages in the book she isn't reading, and when she reaches the end of the chapter she closes it and sets it to one side of the bed so that an edge of sunlight falls full on its leather cover. "Turns out I'm not in the mood," she says pensively, and adds, "Is—Anders coming today?"

Turns out he likes lovelorn better in his serials. On Hawke it makes him only—sad. "I'd think so. He's been coming by around noon or so since you two got back. He won't miss seeing you until you're out of the woods."

"That's very kind of him." She picks for a moment at her blanket, then looks out the window. "I'll thank him when he comes."

"Good for him to get out of the clinic too," Varric offers, and Hawke gives him an absent nod in answer, brow furrowed. He shakes his head, looks down at his notes again; then he says, "Are you sore? Blondie said you could take another dose of the laudanum if you needed it."

Hawke looks back at him, startled, and smiles. "Oh, no. I'm all right. Sorry. Just—" she casts her eyes about for something to latch onto; they land on her own arm where it is bandaged and she lifts it into the air. "Just—getting a handle on not having a hand."

"Ugh." That one _hurts._

"Get it? Handle?"

"You know, they say puns are the lowest form of humor."

"You can't see it, but I'm making a very rude gesture at you right now."

But—at least she's trying. "Just as I'm thumbing my nose at you back. I never spar with invalids. Or the handicapped."

" _Ouch._ Care to lend me a hand with the wound you've just made to my heart? As you can see, I'm one short."

"With the five-finger discount you qualify for, now, I think you can afford your own."

"Says the rogue. Palmed a lot of silvers in your time, have you?"

"And now you try to nail me to the wall with my own profession. How underhanded of you, Hawke."

"I live to serve," Hawke says, and turns her head until she can stop up the sudden tears sliding down her cheeks. "I'm sorry," she says eventually, when her voice is steadier. "This is miserable. Don't put this in the memoirs."

Varric has no intention of it—but neither does he know quite how this story will end, not yet, and he does not often commit to a narrative before he knows the ending. Too much to go wrong in the crafting of it like that, too many little tone-shifts to turn happy or sad or hopeful when there is no hope after all. He says, "I only tell the stories you want me to tell."

"Now _that's_ a lie if I've ever heard one."

"I don't lie," Varric says, affronted. "I _exaggerate_ , maybe. For the sake of the narrative."

Hawke snorts, wiping her eyes with the back of her only wrist. "Which is why the daring rescue will take seven hours instead of a week."

Silence settles down over them, another layer too thick for a day already so warm. Hawke looks down, picks at her blanket again; then she runs her fingers through her unbound hair and meets his eyes again. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that."

Varric clears his throat. "Hawke…listen—"

" _Don't_ apologize, Varric. Please. I'm sick of apologies. I've heard too many of them lately. Made too many of them."

"Oh?" Varric says, and settles himself back into his chair, his booted feet on the windowsill again, his notebook flipped open in his lap. All comfort and ease, if only the appearance of it—if Hawke does not want apologies for seven days of waiting, he will play the hand she's dealt him as close to true as he can. "If you want to talk, Hawke, I'll listen."

One corner of her mouth turns up, the only brightness in a face sick with pallor. "The consummate storyteller."

"Only for you."

She smiles again, though she doesn't answer right away, and for a long time there is no noise in Hawke's bedroom but the scratching of Varric's quill on paper and a songbird in the eaves of the estate next door. Varric doesn't mind; he knows that silence like this is only ever as long as it needs to be, and when Hawke eventually finds words he is already turning to a blank page.

"What happens," she asks, "in stories—to the side characters who don't matter?" Varric blinks, thrown by the question, but he can sense that this is not a question so far from the Wounded Coast as he thinks, and he does not interrupt when she smoothes her hand over the bedspread, then puts the bandaged stump of her other arm beside it, comparing. "The ones who show up for a few pages and then vanish, existing only to be killed off, the ones who don't get names. The ones who—all you know about them is a grieving widow and two or three fat-cheeked children, because that makes it more tragic that they've gone and died."

He puts them away in the back of his head: a footnote in the grander tale, easily forgotten, easily replaced. Unmourned. Those characters are always interchangeable. "It depends on what the hero does about it, I guess."

"What about when the hero's the one who's killed them?"

Varric looks up. Hawke's voice is flat as a Tranquil's, her eyes staring into the middle distance, her mouth thinned to keep back—he can't read it. Anger? Sorrow? "Every villain needs a good backstory," he mutters, and crosses out the top line of his notes.

"I killed her son." Varric says nothing; Hawke blinks, looks down, blinks again. "Or—it was my fault he died, because I took Anders from his clinic when she needed him. I think it's the same thing."

There are empty spaces between those words, but Varric knows enough of storytelling to fill them in properly. "It's not. But I bet you won't listen to that from me."

"Does it matter? A woman's son is dead. A sister, a husband, every relationship you could possibly imagine—" Hawke fists her hand against her forehead and something deep in Varric twists like a knife. "I took someone from all of them."

He, Varric, is not sure what to say. He has been alongside Hawke for so many of these deaths, has helped many others along their way to it, has laughed and joked with Hawke as men and women died at her feet and then helped take the dead's belongings to sell for what sovereigns they could bargain. For good causes, he tells himself. For the expedition. For Hawke's mother, Hawke's family. For the coin he uses to keep Blondie safe, Daisy safe, the elf free, Rivaini out of pants.

A doomed expedition. Hawke's mother, dead all the same. Anders is not safe of his own choosing; Merrill chains herself with mirror-shards. Isabela does whatever she pleases anyway and Fenris—

Fenris is not here.

Varric sighs, leaning back in his chair, and crosses his arms over his chest. Bianca gleams in the sunlight where she rests against the wall, all oiled wood and long shining strings—as much a tool of death as beauty. Hawke sits against her pillows, watching him, waiting, quietly and wholly lost. He can see from here that she is desperately tired and from more than the conversation; he will go, soon, and let her rest, but he'll be _damned_ if he doesn't leave her with one less worry to carry in the process.

"I think," he says at last, "that it all comes down to choices in the end." She tips her head, listening, and he continues. "They made theirs when they joined their companies, when they decided to come up against you in the streets. They chose to attack rather than retreat. You chose to fight back."

Her mouth twists. "I'm not sure their choices were all—informed."

"They aren't always. Sometimes the wrong choices get you killed. Get them killed. And then it's up to their families to decide what to do about it."

"Revenge."

"Or to let go. The woman who took you—who lost her son. She decided to get back at you. And now she's dead for it."

"More death! What a comfort."

"I _mean_ ," he says, dropping both feet to the floor as he looks intently at Hawke, "now it's up to you to hold on to the circle or not."

She stares, her mouth parted; then she shakes her head, tensing one hand in her bedspread. "Nys called it a circle once, too. Before Fenris killed her."

"So break the circle, Hawke."

Hawke closes her eyes, looks down at her fisted hand. Slowly she unfolds it, flattening each finger against the gold-embroidered cloth, and when her fingers are straight she says, quietly, "I don't know how this story ends, Varric. They always stop at the rescue. They never show what comes—after."

"For you?" He lets his eyes half-close, lets his voice deepen into the register he uses to hold the audience captive in the grand room of the Hanged Man. "I see troubles ahead. I see a road that's probably longer and harder than you'd like."

Her light reply almost masks her bitterness. "Oh, _thanks_. Where's Isabela when you need her?"

"But you won't be going it alone," he adds, inclining his head. "It'll work out. We'll all be here for you."

She looks away, and Varric almost misses her murmur. "Not everyone."

Varric stands, snapping his notebook shut and tucking it away as he crosses to the bedside. Hawke watches him come, their eyes of a height like this, and when he reaches the bed he puts one hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently. "We all will," he repeats. "Even him. He'll be here, Hawke. I'm sure of it."

She smiles without answering and leans into his rough, awkward hug, and when at last Varric pulls away he is almost willing to leave her to this bright, cheery room and her book and the songbird twittering in the eaves.

But he knows how days like this hide little lies, and he knows she does not believe him.

—

"He isn't home."

Startled, Sebastian turns on his heel to see a young elf woman with blond hair holding a basket. "I beg your pardon?" he asks, uncertain.

"The elf who lives here. The friend of the Champion." She nods at Fenris's battered door and adjusts her overfull basket on her arm. "He went out early this morning and hasn't come back yet."

"Ah." Somewhat deflated, Sebastian considers Fenris's empty home for a moment. But—if he's simply not home— "May I help you with your basket?"

"I'm nearly home myself." She hesitates, then says, "I think he was heading westward, if that's any help."

Westward—and to the Wounded Coast. "It is. Thank you."

She smiles and continues on her way, and Sebastian sets himself to the western gates after Fenris. Three days now Hawke has been awake and asking for him, and three days now Fenris has absented himself whenever their friends have come to drag him to her home. Aveline, he knows, is near the end of her patience; even Varric has gone so far as to leave subtle hints in notes tucked under Fenris's door. Sebastian does not pretend to understand what terrible things happened to the two of them in that cave on the Coast, but neither does he understand what Fenris tries to do _now_ , even if he knows the why of it _._

He is no stranger to how grief changes a man, after all.

The sky is already grey—a fitting color, he thinks—but the rain holds off as he makes his way through Kirkwall's winding streets. Few people have business out-of-doors today, if the empty roads are any witness, but despite his solitude and the threatening weather Sebastian does not turn back for the shelter of the Chantry. Not yet. Not until he finds—

Fenris, coming in under the gate at the same moment Sebastian approaches it.

He looks better than he has in days, his cheeks fuller and his health stronger, but there is a darkness in his eyes that Sebastian finds deeply unsettling. It is more than hatred, more than anger; it is old enough that he does not know the word for it and thick with death, and as Fenris comes to meet him he realizes that the elf smells strongly of smoke.

"Where have you been?" he asks, not in reprimand but in genuine curiosity.

Fenris jerks his head behind him. "The cave," he says. "To burn it."

_Alone—_ "You should have taken someone with you." He should have taken _Hawke_ with him. Her grief to carry, too—

His mouth thins. "There is nothing there to see. That place—it is better for it to be forgotten."

There are so many things Sebastian wishes to say to that—better _not_ to forget; better to remember and move forward; better to learn and heal in the learning—but he bites his tongue and turns back to the city proper, and after a moment Fenris falls into step with him. Thunder rumbles across the Hightown rooftops in the distance, low and threatening, and Sebastian lifts his face to the leaden sky as if it holds the words he looks for. _Maker, give me wisdom._ "Is it done, then?"

Fenris glances at him, perplexed for a moment as if he had forgotten Sebastian was there. Eventually, he says, "Done, for the moment."

"And your need for revenge is satisfied."

_Now_ the anger is there again; now the darkness begins to seep back into his eyes. "Surely I don't need to remind you of your own history."

"No," Sebastian agrees, ceding the point, and for several streets they walk in silence. Fenris's brow grows darker with the sky above them, his hands fisting at his sides, and again Sebastian wonders what monstrosities occurred in that too-long week—not for curiosity's sake alone, though he knows himself well enough to admit that sin, but—souls seemed such delicate things to be suffering under such terrible weight. "Fenris," he says eventually, without looking at him, faltering but determined to press forward. "If you wish, I—that is, if you need—" He sees Fenris look up at him in the corner of his eye, eyebrow lifted in trace irritation, and Sebastian throws his euphemisms to the wind and faces the elf full-on. Might as well bring the storm. "If you wish to speak of anything, I would be honored to listen."

His lip curls. "It is no tale for a Chantry brother."

"What of a friend?"

Fenris's mouth tightens, and after a moment he turns his head away. "That was unfair of me," he says stiffly, and when he begins to walk again Sebastian walks with him. "I apologize."

"No offense taken," Sebastian says, heart hurting for his friend, and the first bare raindrops begin to patter to the dusty stone around them.

They have not gone much further—ten steps, twelve—when Fenris draws in a breath that sounds painful for the rasp of it and says at last, "They wished to kill me."

"The ones who took you?"

"In the first attack, I was—useless. One had a knife." He reaches up one hand, touches the base of his skull with his longest finger. "Hawke made them swear not to harm me in exchange for her cooperation."

That is enough to make Sebastian angry as he has not been in—a very long time, but this is not the place for his anger and as much as Fenris had disdained the Chantry brother it is his training Sebastian calls upon now, looking for peace and an open heart where he wishes only to punch something very solidly in the mouth. "So she…cooperated, then."

"Yes," Fenris says bitterly. "And I could do nothing."

"The whole week?"

"We were kept in separate cages. She was let out only to—" His jaw tenses violently. "I was never released."

"Until you broke free."

Fenris inclines his head, the motion appearing as likely to break his spine as bend it for how stiff he is, and they turn together up the long stairs that lead to Hightown. Rainwater has begun to collect here in small puddles, thin-sheened silver streaking over the stone steps, rippling only with the falling patter of rain and their own feet.

At last, Sebastian says, "You feel guilty."

The flinch is enough to catch Fenris's bare foot on the lip of the top stair. He takes two more unsteady steps forward into the empty, shuttered Hightown market, his breath coming high and hard, and then he whirls on Sebastian with clenched hands and black eyes. "I did not ask for your judgment."

"It was not meant so. Consider it insight."

" _Sebastian—_ " a snarl like a wounded creature, fierce only to hide the bleeding. "Stay away from this."

He does not mean it in condemnation—but there are ghosts in his own past, beloved faces there and gone so suddenly he has had no chance to grieve, and if he could ever have another moment, another bare instant to share with them, even like this— "As you stay away from Hawke?"

Another flinch, another step backwards. Fenris is on the verge of flight. "Stop."

"You feel guilty for being helpless. For being the reason she would not run on her own."

" _Stop it—_ " A quick whirl on his heel—

Sebastian catches him on the shoulder, fingers clamping on wet leather hard enough to hold and not to bruise. "There is no shame in being protected, Fenris."

The elf is a live wire, vibrating under his hand like a piece of the growing storm made mortal. He will not look at him. "Let me go."

"You're not listening to me."

A sharp laugh. "Let _go._ "

Sebastian lets go. Fenris jerks away like he has been burnt, wheeling in the rain so that water sprays from the ends of his hair, from his hands half-lifted in—defense, in attack. "Save your counsel for your flock."

"You cheapen her sacrifice," Sebastian says—too sharply—and Fenris recoils. But there is something else in his face, now, something more open than it was—Sebastian lifts a quick plea for patience and reaches for the ragged threads of his temper. Grief changed a man; shame changed him, too. "Forgive me. I don't mean to speak harshly. But Hawke's choice should not be taken as something so lightly made. She found something in you precious enough to protect—something she wished to guard from harm at all costs to herself. Wished to _keep_ guarding, even once she knew the pain it would bring to her to do so."

Fenris's breathing is hard again, his narrow chest heaving with each gasp as if the rain is drowning him. Sebastian hesitates, steps closer, reaches out again to lay his hand gently on Fenris's bowed shoulder. Not to hold, this time: to comfort. "There is strength in protecting the ones we love," he tells him softly.

Fenris's eyes are wide and wounded, no anger left to draw over the shame and rage and grief. His mouth opens, closes, opens again; then Fenris pulls himself away from Sebastian's hand, turning his face so that his damp hair hides his expression, and without another word he moves off into the rain.

Sebastian does not follow. He knows where Fenris goes, after all. Suffering, and sorrow—

And home, he thinks, sighing, and with a heavy glance to the empty, rain-soaked streets behind him, Sebastian begins to make his way back to the Chantry.


	10. Chapter 10

Fenris is not strong enough for this.

He does not know how long he stands outside the door to Hawke's estate. Long enough that the rain-hunched guard patrolling the empty square makes one full round and then a second; long enough that even the oiled leather of his jerkin begins to seep and stain and drip onto his bare feet. _Protect_ , Sebastian had said, and he knows that Hawke will keep gentle after three days of asking for him, but—

She is going to send him away, and he will not be able to bear it.

Not like this, not now, not after everything that has happened. If he could go back—if he could have kept himself from hope—but now he is here and Hawke is hurt beyond repair, and it is every bruise his own fault. His own helplessness made real. In Minrathous a failure like this would have been met with public flogging and immediate auction, or abandonment to blood slavery, or torture of his own and then—death. To have left a magister to suffer and be maimed in his stead and for his sake—no. It would be nothing less than what he deserved—and nothing more. In Minrathous, his life would have been over.

He touches the Amell crest at his hip. Home again where it belongs, where he thought he might have once belonged—

Fenris closes his eyes. His life is over here, too.

_Enough_ , he thinks, and his mouth shapes the word even as he lifts his hand to knock. Three days are enough. Three years—have been enough. Let her remove the damaged part at last; let her cut out the soft rotted place that threatens to poison the whole. He deserves no less.

The door opens. Orana stands there as if she has been waiting for him to simply make up his mind, her eyes sad and wounded on his behalf, and when he steps into the open warmth of Hawke's home she withdraws without a word. He knows the way. And yet, even resolved as he is, Fenris finds his steps faltering as he approaches her open door. He can hear movement inside, see shadows dancing across the far wall through rain-lit glass, and as he gains his first glimpse of Hawke in three days he stops despite himself.

Hawke sits cross-legged on her bedcovers, dressed in dark trousers and a soft grey shirt that hangs too large on her now, her hair cleaned and tied back at the nape of her neck. She does not see him standing shadowed in her doorway, focused as she is on her right hand splayed over the crimson coverlet. Her left arm matches the other's angle as far down as the middle of her forearm; there a white bandage cuts it off like a sentence stopped mid-word. Even as he watches she turns her arms, bends her elbows so that she reaches towards her own face. She holds them there a moment, looking at the movement of muscles where the stump of her arm ends; then she rests her elbows on her knees, shoulders bowing forward, and puts the flat of her right hand against air in space before her, as if there were another hand to meet it palm-to-palm, as if she were praying. Again her left arm mirrors the angle, the motion, the bandaged stump of a forearm trying to meet its match; again, still, there is—nothing there.

He makes no sound, but all at once Hawke's head comes up. The movement is sharp and startling like a kite's wings snapping; her eyes are sharp, too, above her hollowed cheeks, pinning him where he stands in the door in the way prey is pinned before being killed and eaten—and he thinks, when he can think, that it is right that she should eat his heart after this, after what he has done to her.

She says, too loudly, "Fenris."

He steps forward.

Hawke says his name again when he is halfway across the room, softer and more surprised, and abruptly he realizes what he must look like, soaked as he is, his hair plastered to his forehead, his clothes wet and rain-stained and leaving streaks of water on her floor. But he has come too far to turn back now, his heart not strong enough to make this journey a second time, and as he draws nearer the bed Hawke makes a short, quick motion as if she means to rise.

"No—" he says abruptly, because he can see the splint still wrapped tight to her ankle, and whether it is his words or his face that stops her she goes wholly still, half-raised hand falling back into her lap, her face turning up to him like a flower turns its face to daylight. She knows him. He can see it in her eyes, and even though his mind has known for three days that her fever has healed and her bruises have lessened, it is still a terrible shock to see her so much less—damaged than he remembers. "Save your strength."

"You came," she says, wondering.

"Yes," he tells her lamely, reaching her side, finding suddenly he has no further plan, his hands hanging loose and awkward at his sides. "I…yes."

"I—wasn't sure if you would."

"Sebastian told me," he begins, then falters into silence. Hawke watches him, expectant, and he gropes for words, for—anything. "How—are you feeling?"

Her mouth quirks as she flicks her fingers at herself in an encompassing gesture. "Better than I was. As you can see."

"The bruises are fading."

"Anders is marvelous."

"Unlike—" he begins without thought, and then his mind catches up with his tongue and he clamps his teeth together.

But Hawke has already caught his meaning. "Unlike Nys's healer, yes."

Guilt swells in his gut, twisting him into a hot, tight knot. "Forgive me. I did not mean to speak of that."

"Afraid of unpleasant memories?" Hawke asks, and at Fenris's stony glare she lets out a bark of laughter. "No need to worry about _that._ Those have settled so near the surface I don't even have to stir them to bring them up."

Fenris winces, hurt. "All the same, I apologize."

Something snaps tight in Hawke's face at that, something thin pulling thinner until he thinks she might tear apart, and her voice comes out choked. "Please. Fenris. _Anything_ but more apologies."

"Hawke—"

She forces a smile. "I've had nothing but three days of people telling me how sorry they are for not coming sooner. You're the one person in the world who doesn't need to apologize for that, too."

His jaw clenches. It is not even his own guilt he wishes to ease—Sebastian, like an arrow, had struck too near that heart—but he does not know how else to convey to Hawke his shame, his regret at his own helplessness. But—Hawke wishes him to be silent, for what little time he has left here.

He will accept that.

At last, his voice foreign and formal to his own ears, Fenris says, "As you wish."

And now _Hawke_ flinches, her gaze flicking away from him to the coverlet. " _Please_ don't say it like that. That's not—that isn't what I meant at all. I just meant…" But she cannot seem to find the words, and instead she trails off into a forlorn silence.

He does not know what to say at all, now, so instead he says nothing. The room is still for a long time save the drip of water from the ends of his slow-drying hair and the rain against the window-glass; then, finally, Hawke says, "Fenris. Are you—angry with me?"

His shock is enough to startle him from silence. "Of course not."

"Then why are you—acting like—" she makes a rough gesture at him, the lines at the corners of her eyes deepening with unhappiness. "Why did you take so long to come?"

As if she does not—Fenris knows she does not mean to toy with him, but he is stretched too thin himself already and he cannot pretend to restraint when his memories still flood with Hawke's screams, with metal on flesh, with the smell of hot iron and blood. Guilt and shame run so hot in him he might have been staked spread-limbed in the great shadeless arena of Minrathous, slave laid out a sacrifice to the regret that spreads like wings of fire behind his ribs. He snorts and turns on his heel, scrubbing one hand over his face and into his hair because there _is_ no answer to that, no possible response that will not hurt him or her in the giving of it.

Hawke says, "You _are_ angry."

Not at _her_ , but he _is_ angry, _furious,_ caught in the terrible impotent rage that has burned for ten days and consumes all things in that burning. "Yes," he snarls into his fingers, and he turns again to Hawke. The words tumble out like stones from an upturned hand, heavy and precise and cracking on the floor beneath him. "This morning. I returned to the cave."

"What?"

"I burned it." He can still see it in his mind, the empty, scarred table splashed and shining with oil; the bodies rank with rot and insects still lying where they had fallen, where _he_ had felled them; the spear-haft still jutting from Nys's broken breastbone. "Everything. To ash."

" _What_?" Hawke breathes again, and when he turns she is white as unfired china—and yet even as he watches two spots of color begin to blaze high on her cheeks. "You went back without me?"

"Yes."

"You— _why_? You think I didn't want to see that place destroyed as badly as you?"

He does not want this hurt in her face—and yet he savors it all the same, sickening himself, prizing beyond reason the life and strength that must lie at the root to give her its voice. Something pounds in his chest like a hammer against his ribs. He cannot quite draw breath. "It was best this way. You could not have walked the path."

"I would have found a way!"

"And harmed yourself further? Undone all the mage's work?" The anger is hot in his chest, a white pinpricked star that makes his skin tingle and his lyrium flicker with light. Her eyes catch the reflection, throw it back just as strong and brighter. The rain still has not stopped.

"That didn't slow you down, did it?" she snaps, and Fenris moves closer, wanting to be close to this scalding heat even as it tears him apart. "You left me behind—you didn't even give me the _choice._ "

"You expect me to know your mind from a distance?"

"You could have at least _asked!_ After everything—after all of that, I'd have hoped you'd at least—stick your head in the door and mention, 'oh, I'm going to go back to the cave and burn everything in that _Void-_ taken place to cinders, do you mind,' and then I could have said—'no, I don't mind, enjoy your massacre-broil,' or 'yes, actually, let me come and I'll save you a torch, I'll just get someone to tie this rope around my waist so you can drag me up the mountain behind you!'" She clenches her eyes shut, opens them again, and suddenly, without warning, Fenris can see the weighted shadow of sorrow and fear that has dogged her for three days, that has been shackled to her throat by his own silence. "Anything— _anything_ would have been better than being forced to sit here going mad, waiting on you, ter—" she chokes on an unexpected gasping sob, tries again, "—terrified that I'd chased you off again because I wasn't strong enough when you needed me to be."

He doesn't know how he finds his voice, how the words come out level. "I meant to _protect_ you, Hawke."

"And now you've had your revenge twice over," she bites out through another heaving gasp, her hand fisted in the cloth at her knee. "When do I get mine, Fenris?"

_Oh,_ but her voice drips with hurt, with unspent fury, and he grieves at the strength of it because this is not a thing meant for Hawke to carry; this is not what he meant to bring her on this last visit. " _You_ want it?"

"Yes!" Hawke shouts, the word falling dead in the rain-dampened corners of her room. She glares at him, her eyes bright with tears. "No. I don't know. I don't _know_. They cut off my damned _hand_. I can—I can be upset about it if I like."

"That is _not_ what I meant!"

"Isn't it?"

"No!"

" _Damn_ it," Hawke gasps, swiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. "Why are you _here_ , Fenris?"

To say—to see one last time—

He straightens, his jaw tight. There is nothing to say that will mend this. "Excuse me," he says stiffly. "I should go."

"You should—" Hawke repeats, astonished; then all at once she puts her hand over her suddenly sheet-white face and collapses into herself, and his racing heart stumbles into an abrupt limp.

For a long, stretching moment, she does not move. Her shoulders are curved like a bow and strained as tight, her face hidden from him, something so stone-hard and hurt in the air between them that he cannot breathe beneath it. Quietly, he says, "Hawke?"

" _Shit_ ," he hears her say, the word thin and muffled with her fingers and desperate even so, and her hand fists against her forehead. "Damn it. I've done this all wrong."

He doesn't know what she means, but even from here he can see that she has little strength left. But then again, for this, neither does he. "You should not blame yourself for this. You're tired; you should rest."

"Not yet. Not yet. Fenris—listen." She lifts her head with great effort, holds his eyes with a pale, bruised, pleading gaze. "It's not even about the cave, not really. For all I care the blasted place can get sucked into the hills and never seen again. We each have to figure parts of this out by ourselves and I understand that, I do—and I understand why you went there alone. But it's been—" she swallows, hard, and he finds himself clenching the bedpost with one hand for as much anchor as support, because there is something terrible swelling behind her eyes and if he is not careful he will sweep out to sea with it, drowned, lost without hope. "It's been three days. And before that I was—sick, and before that we were in the cave, and before that we were _fighting_ , and I think—I thought—"

She looks down, clenches her eyes shut; her voice is a whisper through dying leaves. "I was afraid you'd decided having to deal with the—thing I'd become was…too much. I wouldn't have blamed you if it was."

He drags in a breath, stricken. "No. No. Never."

"Was it the nightmare? Orana told me what I—but Fenris, those were fever-dreams. I didn't know what I was saying, I swear. It was just a terrible memory."

"I know that, Hawke."

"Then why—" she starts, but before he can speak her eyes fly to his, a new numb horror rippling across her face like a stream burst by a thrown stone. "But—" she breathes, aghast at her own delayed comprehension, "what you went through in that cave was worse, wasn't it?" She blinks, looks at him like a stranger; then her eyes go distant as she looks back with sudden perspective on this conversation, on the week in the cave, on his own three days of absence. She swallows as if her throat has closed; then Hawke covers her face with her fingers and says, certain, "It was. What I put you through—it must have been. I only had to endure."

Of course not, he wants to say, of _course_ not—but all his words are stopped up in his throat, throttled by truth, by the sight of Hawke bent so suddenly and so totally to the realization of his own suffering. Without meaning to he reaches out, his fingers hovering over her disheveled hair, but her shoulders shudder in a dry sob and his hand curls into a fist instead. He manages only, " _Hawke_."

"I'm sorry," she says, pushing against the bed, against herself, straightening without meeting his eyes as she wipes the tears from her own. "I'm so sorry. Fenris, I—I'm so _sorry_. I didn't know. I should have—I should never have demanded those things of you. I should never have asked you to make that kind of choice. I've had so many people here and I know Aveline's been feeding you, but I didn't—I should have—"

The words escape him without thought. "I thought you wished for no more apologies."

_Now_ she looks at him; then she lets out a soft, startled laugh, and suddenly the thick bruised place in the air between them begins to lighten. "You're right. I did."

He hovers a moment more, uncertain, but after a few seconds Hawke shifts her weight away from him, opening a place on the edge of the bed for him to sit, and with only a flicker of hesitation he takes it despite his still-damp clothes. This will only make it worse in the end for him, he knows, but Fenris is a selfish man and if it gains him a few minutes more, here…

"This is a mess, isn't it?" Hawke's voice is quiet as she picks at her bandage, and when she looks at him there is little left of that white-cold anger in her face. Now she looks only tired. "I think I liked it better when we were only uncomfortable and a little awkward before, instead of miserable and angry _and_ hurt." Her mouth quirks. "And handless, in my case."

Fenris shakes his head, the gesture as much at the sentiment as at the manner of its expression. "The joke is too soon."

"Impossible," Hawke tells him, cupping her forearm in her hand as if to present it to him. "Anders takes the bandages off tomorrow. If I'm not joking about it already, Isabela will get the first one and I'll spend _forever_ catching up."

He shakes his head again, smiling through his own reluctance to do so, but she holds her arm a moment too long and her cheeks flush just too bright, and without meaning to he reaches out, reaches forward, touches his fingers to the inside of her elbow, lets his palm come to rest just above the edge of the bandages so that the red band around his wrist meets the white. "I did not come here to fight with you," he begins, the apology already on his tongue; but she is watching him as if he has become something at once wondrous and terrifying, and the words vanish without voice.

She covers his hand with her own, her words quiet and unsteady. "It's my fault. I didn't realize. In the end I was so sick, and I didn't realize—what you must have gone through while I had no mind. I'm sorry I didn't understand before. I'm sorry I didn't _thank_ you before. For waiting." A corner of her mouth tilts up. "For trying. For risking your life for a raving lunatic."

A half-choked laugh tears out of him. "I could do no less."

"It would have been easier on you. To do less, I mean."

"Nothing would have kept me from you, Hawke," he says, his voice low, intent, and feels suddenly her heartbeat skip forward beneath his palm, a surge into a thundering rush of something he doesn't dare name, not yet. His thumb strokes along her elbow once, and then again. A third time.

He has no right to do this—not to be here with her, not to touch her like this, not to—anything more, even if he cannot stop himself wishing it.

She does not pull away.

"Fenris," she says quietly, the humor gone now to leave something more anxious in its wake, and her eyes jump down to his hand and back again. "What you said…what you said. In the cave. When I…"

"Yes."

Hawke swallows, meets his eyes. There is no stumble in her voice—only longing. "Did you mean it?"

His heart leaps. He has enough regrets to bend even the back of a magister, but this…

Fenris does not regret this. He says, "Yes."

Her eyes close and open again, slowly, and when she looks at him it is as if the world has tilted between one moment and the next. "Why did you wait so long to come?"

No sound but the rain outside; no words but the truth. "I expected to be sent away."

"But I don't want you to go."

She says it easily, simply, as if these words have not shredded the lonely, shadowed path he expected into glittering shards; his blood pounds in his ears. Somehow he has leaned closer to her; somehow his other hand has found its way to her shoulder, to the line of her neck, a skimming brush over the too-raised bone of her cheek. His voice is low and thick and rougher than he means it. "I have no wish to leave."

"You left once."

"I was a fool."

She gives a watery laugh. "I didn't help."

"I should have…" He swallows down the jumping pulse in his throat, touches his fingertips to her cheek again. The things that mattered then still matter now, Danarius and a sister and a past he does not remember, but one full week in a lightless cave—and _so_ _much_ wasted time. "That night. Hawke, I should have stayed."

She draws in a breath, lets it out again, slow and smooth as curtains pulling apart over a broad sun-swallowed window. Her heartbeat thunders under his palm; her face is alight. Alive.

Then she says, the sound breaking in the middle as if she is too small for the emotion that roils inside her, "So—stay now." Fenris stares, caught unbalanced; Hawke's hand comes up to catch his wrist, holding his fingers against her cheek, her too-bright eyes holding his. "Here. If you still want. With—me."

There is no promise he can make to that. Words are such worthless things anyway, falling away before the swell of emotion in his chest like sparrows thrown back by the west winds. He leans forward, closer to her, meaning to say— _something—_ but a light catches in her eyes instead, something like hope but deeper than hope, and her lips part as she draws nearer to meet him, as she draws in a short, shallow breath.

_Ah—_

He hesitates when she does, giving them both a chance to check their hearts; then all at once she laughs and he smiles and his hand curls around the back of her neck—

And he kisses her.

It is only a little thing, chaste and cautious and gentler than he knows to be. Her lips are chapped; his own are rough with salt and smoke and his clothes are still damp enough to be uncomfortable, but none of it—none of it _matters_ , not now, not like this with Hawke pulling him closer, her hand on his cheek, holding him in place despite his soaring, her smile against his mouth. They have survived so much hatred and death over the last seven days; this is no panacea, not for wounds that run so deep as theirs—but it _is_ a step to healing for them both, small and sure and a _start._

He draws back, kisses her again. Twice more. Three times. The third time she does not let him go.

Three _years_. A lifetime like this and it would still not be enough.

Still, despite the circumstances—despite _themselves_ —the embrace remains quiet, as if that might disguise the wild driving drum-beat of his heart, and Fenris finds himself glad of it. Hawke is still injured and they are _both_ still wounded, and to press so hard on something still so young and tender could only cause them pain. This thing between them is new enough; better to let it grow into steady life and breath before they test its endurance.

Then Hawke makes a soft, gentle noise in the back of her throat as he pulls away, and Fenris nearly throws his resolutions to the rain. But the hollows of her cheeks check him, and the shadows beneath her eyes, and the wince she makes as muscles pull on twinging ribs, and though he does not quite know the way of comfort Fenris settles for gripping her only hand with his own, as if that might stop them both from trembling. Time later for the rest; it is enough that she does not wish him to leave. In Minrathous—

In Minrathous, Danarius would have given him to die. In Minrathous, there would be no place in his heart left tender and yielding beneath the scars. He no longer lives in that city; that city must no longer live in him.

"Sleep, Hawke," he tells her, his voice low.

Her hand turns over beneath his, palm to palm, as if she is praying. "How long will you be here?"

This answer is easy, no hesitation in the baring of it. "Until you tell me to go."

She laughs. "Couldn't if I wanted to. You're the only one who enjoys my humor."

" _Enjoy_ is a strong word, Hawke."

"Tolerate, then."

"Better," he says, and watches her as she watches him, her eyes half-lidding, one corner of her mouth turned up in a smile. She tugs at him gently and he lets himself be tugged, lets himself move into place beside her on the bed without thought to his rain-stained clothing so that her head rests on his arm, so that her knees fit alongside his knees, so that his mouth brushes over the soft skin at the nape of her neck. He wonders if she can feel his disbelieving fingers shake where they hold her too tightly; he wonders if his pulse thumps as fast and uncontrolled in his throat as hers.

Pulling memory between them, she asks, "Will you tell me about Seheron?"

"I will," Fenris murmurs, memory's other half; and he does, quietly, until eventually she falls asleep, her fingers twined with his.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: The author of this part's epigraph can be found on Tumblr under the name [sincerelyjoanna](http://sincerelyjoanna.tumblr.com). She was kind enough to allow me to use this piece, and I highly recommend her work if you have any interest in poetry.

Part Four

I DO NOT LOVE YOU FOR YOUR  
strength and grit, for your set jaw,  
for the harsh cartography of your knuckled  
fist. I do not love you for your  
sharp corners.  
I rub your tensed wrist like  
a pliant mouth, I wait for spread  
fingers and vulnerable palm: a  
hollow nest to dream in.  
I want the hurt you soothe like an  
ulcer in your mouth, your night terror,  
your raw-eyed vulnerability: these  
unarmored parts which  
are mine alone.  
 _Darling, you are not at war._  
Slow down, breathe deep, drop your guard.  
No one is chasing you but me.

— _Civil War,_ Joanna Joseph

—

Anders hears Hawke before he sees her.

" _No_ ," she says, loud enough for her voice to carry in through the cracked clinic door, and it carries with it the annoyed ring of too many repetitions. "I told you—any sudden emotional outbursts that may or may not occur I'd like to happen with as little audience as possible, if it's all the same to you."

He looks up to see her standing in his half-open doorway, speaking to someone just outside his line of view. He can't tell who the other person is over the noise of Darktown's alleys—Varric? Aveline?—but whoever it is says something tense and subdued in response, and Hawke's tone softens. "Yes, even you. I haven't got so much dignity left I can let uncontrollable crying destroy it altogether."

Another murmur—and then Hawke's mouth twists in something almost a smile, and when she leans forward her companion leans to meet her—

—and Fenris kisses her briefly on the mouth.

Hawke draws back, smiles at him. Fenris does not smile, but there is something gentle enough in his eyes to tear at his heart anyway, and as Hawke speaks one last time with her voice too hushed and tender to make out, Anders turns on the spot, groping blindly on the shelf before him for—anything. His fingers close around a little jar of elfroot and that's good enough, he'll need that for Hawke's arm, and the last of her bruises, and something _hurts_ inside his chest—

_Control yourself. We have more important concerns before us._

_Shut up_ , he tells Justice uncharitably, and though disapproval washes over him like a low tide the spirit subsides for the moment. Anders clenches the jar tightly in one hand, listening to the clinic door creak closed behind him, and then he draws in a long breath and lets it out again, just as slow, just as emptying. _Enough. You knew this would happen._

"Anders?"

"Hawke," he says, turning, and even like this her crooked grin draws out from him a smile of his own. "Right on time."

She glances down the rows of cots, most empty save the two at the far end holding bandaged, sleeping men from a Lowtown scuffle. "I won't take you away from your patients for too long."

"Don't worry about that."

"I won't," she repeats, more firmly, and Anders does not argue with the set of her chin. Instead he shows her to one of the low tables, leaving her to sit carefully on its edge as he gathers the rest of his elfroot, a little sharp knife, and a linen bag for the dirty bandages. She looks paler than he'd like, though her eyes are hard, and when he returns to the table she does not hesitate to present her arm to him.

Still— "Are you ready?"

Hawke opens her mouth, closes it again—and nods, once. Anders bends his head.

The white wrapping at the end of her left arm is clean and tight, Anders's own work after their disaster of a rescue on the Coast, and it unwinds in one long pale strip from her elbow to the place where her arm ends. In all honesty he has always liked this part; there is something rhythmic in it, the slow unfurling of fabric, the reach and pull and reach again as he circles around the damaged limb. At first, it bares only more white-stripped cloth. Then skin begins to show: two inches, and four and six, and then all at once the last bit of wrapping falls away in one piece to leave only a thick cotton pad stuck with sweat and dried blood to the end of Hawke's arm.

Slowly, carefully, he peels it away. Nothing more is left.

"Well," Anders says at last, surprised despite himself as he holds her forearm in two fingers, "it really doesn't look bad at all." And it doesn't, not really. His stitches have healed evenly where he'd pulled the skin together, meeting itself in one thin straight line, cutting across the end of her arm like a seam at the bottom of a stocking. Nothing is left of the infection either despite its once-fierce grip, despite her own atrocious condition that day on the Coast. He'd barely recognized her in that starved, beaten thing crumpled in the sand; but now, like this, with her eyes clenched and her face pale and her head turned away from her arm, from _him—_

The sight of her as she was, broken, is easier to believe.

 _The Champion was not ready_ , Justice observes. Anders takes up his little knife and says nothing.

For a long time there is no sound in the clinic but soft snoring and the quiet _snick_ of his stitches snapping under the sharpened knife-blade. Hawke does not look at him once—but neither does she weep, and Anders can't quite read the pinch of her eyebrows for anger or fear. At last, though, the last stitch slides free of scarring flesh, and Anders drops the crust-stiffened thread into the sack with the bandages to be burnt. Hawke lets her arm fall back into her lap.

 _Oh_ , he thinks, and someone in his head lets out a soft sigh.

Anders has seen amputees before. Healed dozens of them over the years, some of them accidents at the Bone Pit or mercenary brawls gone bad; in fewer cases he'd seen purposeful mutilation, a debtor on the wrong side of the Carta or a double-crosser with too few escape plans. He should have known—but this is _Hawke_ , Champion of Kirkwall, indomitable, unconquerable. He had not realized she would be so scarred beneath the healing skin.

He says, softly, "Hawke?"

Her lips work against each other—to force out words or to keep back a sob, he doesn't know. Eventually, though, she abandons speech and wrests her eyes to meet his where he still bends at her side, and Anders has the sudden urge to immolate this entire _accursed_ city until not a standing stone is left, because what _right_ does it have to shadow Hawke's face like this, to line Hawke's mouth like this, to give Hawke this grief on top of even those she already carries?

The same right as he has to comfort her, a faraway voice whispers: none at all.

"I'll—get Fenris," he says, stumbling over himself as he straightens, but the elf's name seems as galvanizing as anything and Hawke's good hand closes around his wrist.

"No need," she says, the words vanishing into an inhale. She takes in another breath, then two, then lets it out again in a harsh hiss. "I'm fine. I can do this."

He grips her knees, squeezes. Here for her, where there is no one else—this part of her given only to him. "…All right."

It takes her a minute or two more, but at last Hawke slowly begins to run her fingers down the length of her mangled forearm. She looks at the rounded end first, tracing the line of the scar with her eyes; then her thumb draws over it, skittish and skipping at first, then stronger, pushing here and there to see what sensation she has left beneath the proud, raised, stitch-scarred flesh. She puts the tips of her fingers across it, presses down. "How many stitches did you put in?"

"I'm not sure."

"Quite a few."

"Yes."

Hawke hesitates, lets out a dry ghost of air between her teeth—then covers the end of her arm with her palm and looks up. "Thank you, Anders."

He shakes his head. He does not tell her she is welcome; he does not tell her not to think of it again. These sorts of wound cannot be closed so easily with needle and thread. "You'll need to keep it clean for the next few days, spend a little healing magic in it if you can. How's that coming along?"

Hawke smiles, sudden and proud, her hand lifting between them until flame sparks between her fingers. It is not so bright as it once was, nor does it burn so hot—but the fire is _there_ where it has not been since the Coast, the twist-gold flicker stronger every day, and Anders guesses she will be close enough to full strength before the end of the month.

 _Good_. _It is right that the Champion be made stronger from this._

"Not this way," Anders mutters, waving away Hawke's inquisitive look as he moves to the jar-cluttered table. "I'll give you a lotion to use in the morning and at night. It'll help with the scarring and any pain."

"It doesn't hurt right now. A little tender, maybe."

He smiles and holds out the little capped jar. "Until you smack it into a doorframe."

"Flames. You do go for the worst-case scenario, don't you?"

"It's the Anderfels in me. We're all so naturally bleak."

Hawke laughs. The sound soars through his chest, filling him up with something lighter than air, and he cannot help but smile himself as Hawke reaches up to squeeze his shoulder. "This means a lot to me," she tells him, and when he touches her tender forearm she does not flinch. "I'll be back in a few days."

"Don't strain yourself."

"As my healer commands." She gives him a wry grin and snaps a rough salute, and with only the slightest fumbling she manages to get the jar into a small pouch on her belt one-handed. She flutters a wave, shakes out her long sleeve so that it covers her stump of an arm—and is gone.

Anders stands there a little longer, listening to the soft exchange that follows outside his clinic doors despite himself—to spite himself. He cannot quite make out the words, Fenris's deep voice too careful and Hawke's at first too bright, but as they begin to fade into the common noise of Darktown her tone quiets into something truer.

He pretends, just for a moment, that her voice has changed like that for him.

Then he shakes himself out of it, lets himself be reminded that there is work to be done—that there is _justice_ to be done—and turns again to his clinic and the patients sleeping unconcerned and unaware only a few cots away. "No rest for the weary," he murmurs to himself, and in the back of his head a scalding voice adds in a voiceless whisper— _for the wicked._

—

"What if you grip it a little further down?"

"Like this? I can't do it this way; it'll hit the ground when I try to bring the bladed end around."

"No, no. Turn your hand—there. Will that work?"

Hawke swivels experimentally, the longer end of a wooden quarterstaff whirling around her shoulders as she brings it to bear before her. "Yes," she says, sighting down its lines, and turns to face Merrill again. "That'll be perfect."

"Wonderful!" Merrill smiles, hefting her own bare-wood staff before her. "You're quite a bit taller than me; I wasn't sure."

"No, I think that should work just fine. Should I try it again?"

"Do," Merrill says, and steps back so that Hawke has full use of the broad space cleared in her study. It had surprised her, honestly, when Hawke had first suggested the room as their tentative sparring ground. The assault that had happened here barely three weeks ago is no secret to any of them, and neither is the torture that followed, but the blood-stained wine-stained couch has been removed and replaced, the battle-gouged floor sanded and refinished and polished again—and the window closed and bolted, the curtain drawn across the glass to hide the world from them—and them from it. Hawke has not looked at it once.

A shame, Merrill thinks privately, watching Hawke step carefully through the motions they have worked out together. The weather has been _wonderful_ the last few days, the sky cloudless and blue as a halla's eyes in deep summer—but Hawke has not ventured outside once since Anders gave her leave to stand, not even to see the sun. Merrill does not know if it is fear or habit stopping her now but she _does_ worry, secretly, if that shadow might not wither her on the vine in the end.

The cuff of Hawke's sloppily-rolled left sleeve slips down mid-swing, tangling her elbow and the staff together and ruining what little grip she has. The staff's long end swings out, carried by now-unchecked momentum; Hawke catches at it awkwardly with her right hand, twisting her wrist against its carrying weight, and barely manages to stop the thing before it destroys the little glass lamp on the end table.

"Damn it," she says, looking at nothing, and drops the end of her staff to knock against the hardwood floor.

Merrill lets out the breath trapped in her throat. "It wasn't bad, lethallan. Perhaps we could roll your sleeve higher. Have you got any—pins? Or needle and thread?"

"No," Hawke says shortly, and the smile she gives Merrill is too brittle at the corners. "Don't worry about it. I'll start over."

"But it'll just fall loose again, won't it?"

Hawke leans hard on her staff. "Can you show me the second bit again, where you worked out how to keep it from walloping me in the shin when I turn? I keep trying to reach like I used to, and that's obviously not going to work."

Merrill hesitates only a moment before she steps forward. She knows that Hawke is avoiding the subject—knows _why_ , too, as she watches Hawke prop the staff clumsily in the crook of her elbow to roll up her sleeve one-handed; as she looks at the simple knotted fastenings of Hawke's trousers, Hawke's shirt; as she studies Hawke's hair, tied crookedly and hanging too loose over her shoulder. Her life has been riven into a _before_ and _after_ as it is; to change even these things would mean that more has been lost than that, that part of her old life has gone without hope of recovery. _Ah, lethallan!_

But Merrill says only, "Like this," and lifts her staff to the level of her eyes.

The practice goes smoother after that, no further mishaps with either sleeve or pole as Merrill shows Hawke the exercises she'd worked out for a staff-wielder with one hand. The magic itself does not worry Merrill overmuch—Hawke is a formidable mage, even with some of her finesse gone with her fingers—but close-quarters fighting has never been Hawke's strength, and a sword-edge swinging towards one's face so rarely left quite enough clarity of thought to cast.

Still, she is not sure this is enough to help Hawke. She hopes so, even a little.

But they finish the series regardless, Merrill stepping in as Hawke's mirror image near the end, her staff tapping one-two one-two-three against Hawke's own. The tempo increases as they go, as all dances do when the dancers know their partner too well, but Hawke meets her point for point and does not falter, even on her sore ankle, even when the sleeve of her shirt unfurls again over her arm. At last they finish the set, their staves a high staccato drum-tap against each other, and when they come to rest near nose-to-nose, wooden poles crossed at each other's throats, they are both smiling through the sweat that stains their foreheads.

" _Wonderful_ ," Merrill says, flourishing her staff as she steps back without meaning to.

Hawke's own salute is less ornamented without the second hand to carry it through; after, she merely bows. "All due to the teacher," she tells her, grinning. "It's doing it in a real fight that worries me."

"As it should," Fenris says from the doorway, his arms crossed tightly over his chest, his scowl as black as pitch.

All at once Hawke's smile disappears. Merrill stiffens too, feeling like an errant child caught sneaking sweets behind the aravels, and even though Hawke has asked her here and there is nothing dangerous and nothing _wrong_ in what they have been practicing, she still can't stop her rising blush.

"Fenris," Hawke says. "I thought you were meeting Isabela for cards."

"She was not at the Hanged Man. I thought _you_ meant to rest."

 _Oh_ , there is ice in that tone—but unhappiness too, and worry. Merrill wonders if Hawke can hear it too. "I did rest," Hawke retorts. "I slept almost two hours. Then I decided to do something more useful."

"By putting yourself at risk of further injury."

"By _preventing_ them from happening. I can't avoid fighting forever, Fenris."

His face darkens at that, his brows jerking down over his eyes like they have been yanked on strings, and as he steps into the room Merrill darts forward, placing herself between their figures as if to keep the tides from meeting. "It was my idea," she offers, unsure of her own need to apologize. "Hawke's magic was coming back, and I'd worked out a few ways to make up for the hand she doesn't have anymore, and I thought they might be useful."

"And they were, Merrill," Hawke says evenly, putting her hand on Merrill's shoulder and squeezing. " _I'm_ grateful to you, if nothing else."

Fenris's lip curls. "You put yourself at too much risk."

"And you haven't the slightest bit of faith in me." Hawke's mouth twists; then she nods her head in a sharp gesture at the spare staves leaning against the wall. "Grab one. I'll show you."

"No."

"Why not? The poker's right there, if you think the staff will be too gentle on me."

The words are light enough, but Merrill can hear the mockery beneath them—and so can Fenris, if the bitter glare he gives Hawke is any indication. But the victory goes to her in the end; Fenris stalks across the room and takes up a long, slender staff of white oak, grasping it further down the haft than Merrill would have herself, as if he holds a narrow greatsword instead.

"Oh," Merrill says. "Oh dear."

"Don't worry," Hawke tells her, smiling without mirth, but as Merrill watches Hawke and Fenris move towards each other, hunting, predatory, snarling their fingers into this tight, angry thing in the air between them—she worries.

Hawke makes the first blow, a tight whistling snap of her staff to Fenris's ribs, her amputated arm driving the pole for leverage. He barely meets the strike in time—the sound of the wood cracking together makes Merrill jump—and when his counter forces Hawke back a step his face holds more concentration than it had before. She ought to be glad, Merrill thinks—a week ago Hawke could not have made that effort—but instead, she feels only ill.

Hawke does not strike at him again. Instead they circle each other, quick sparking taps of staff on staff, eyes on each other's faces as if to pierce the other's defense by will alone. Fenris has the upper hand and they both know it—a week of practice, however fruitful, could never allow a one-handed mage to draw near Fenris's skill at combat—but Hawke does not flinch and Fenris does not give ground, and they neither of them look to guard Hawke's missing hand.

"Raise the point," Merrill calls in spite of her concern, and Hawke lifts the end of her staff just in time to deflect a side-swinging blow from Fenris's right. The motion of it jars the staff hard against her arm and Merrill winces—but though Hawke shudders she presses through it, braces her weak ankle and presses her left forearm full against the staff until the end of it wavers away from her face. Merrill smiles, delight overcoming fear—but Fenris's frown only deepens, his eyebrows pulling harder together, the tendons in his throat tightening as he whirls his staff down and away.

A momentary stagger at the sudden release and Hawke's own staff is up again, Fade-sparks spraying from her fingers, a wounded pinch to the corners of her eyes as she says, low, "Still trying to push me away, I see."

Fenris snorts, an ugly sound, and Merrill can see the distemper behind his eyes as he steps forward again, staff raised to meet Hawke's blow. "Are you still straining harder than you should?"

"Still pretending you're not _angry—_ "

"Only while you pretend you are fine," Fenris snaps, and the smart blow he raps across Hawke's staff is sudden enough to crack the wood. Hawke does not give way, though, darting to the right to keep the worst force from her one hand; Fenris follows her, pressing his advantage, all tense lines and hard-set jaw and pushing harder than he needs to in what Merrill realizes must be his worry-fed wish to show Hawke her own weakness.

They move like two crows circling carrion, both desperate to feed and tear but fearing to bare weakness to the other. And yet, Merrill knows what drives Fenris, knows too that Hawke will not bend beneath the pressure; if anything she will break, and will break him with her, and Merrill is many things but she is _not_ one to stand by and do nothing, not when there is something she can still do to preserve what precious things are left to her. They need to talk. All three of them.

"That's enough," she says, but it is too quiet; she steps towards them, a quick fluttering motion, her hands wringing together in unhappiness. "Lethallan, _please_ stop!"

Hawke turns, startled—

—and the unchecked staff in Fenris's hand, Fenris who has _never_ heeded Merrill's words, thuds hard into Hawke's left arm.

Hawke drags air through her nose, a rough startled noise as thin as tissue that shreds the room to silence. Then she doubles over, arm bent into her chest, her hand clutching convulsively at her own elbow, quick hissing breaths sliding past her teeth like steam escaping into the air around her. Fenris's own staff drops to the floor, muffled by the little carpet before the hearth; he bends as she does, his face as ashen as hers, his own hands reaching to cover the place where he has struck her. "Hawke," he says helplessly, aghast. "Hawke—"

"Oh, _lethallan_ ," Merrill says, wretched with guilt; but even as she reaches them Hawke is yielding to Fenris's hold, her face hiding itself in his neck, her fingers still gripping her own shoulder as she curves into him. He murmurs something Merrill cannot catch and she sighs, straightens, pulls away from them both.

"It's fine," she tells them, a startled-sounding laugh creeping through the pain that tightens her voice. "I promise. It just surprised me. I'm _fine_."

"Really?" asks Merrill, doubting, but even like this she can see the color returning to Hawke's cheeks, the fingers softening their knuckled grip, the unrolled sleeve steadying its drift as Hawke stills again. "I can fetch Anders—I'm sure he won't mind—"

"No need," Hawke says even as Fenris snaps, "Do it."

Merrill looks to Fenris; Hawke shakes her head. "I don't need Anders."

"Your arm is too weak. You need more rest—you should not have left your room today."

"And that wasn't exactly a death-blow. I can heal it myself."

"You have already done too much—"

"And I can do a little more without exhausting myself. It's a _bruise_. It's _fine_."

Fenris's hands knot into fists at his side. He is not a tall man, not even beside Hawke—but like this, his voice trembling, thunder black in his face and lightning streaking down his arms, Merrill feels very—small. He snaps, "Let me see it."

Hawke's lips pinch together—but she yanks her sleeve up with two fingers, thrusts out her arm, baring to both Fenris and Merrill her naked, scarred stump. The skin just above the inside of her elbow is bright red and swelling; it has not yet begun to bruise, but Merrill has little doubt it will color gloriously without healing. "There."

"Hawke—" he begins, twitching forwards as if he would reach for her, but she shakes out her sleeve instead to hide away both the wound and the scar.

" _Please_. Just—trust me, Fenris. I can do this myself. I can."

His mouth opens, worry and anger warring in his eyes—but Merrill moves between them first, sparrow between crows, sparrow's heart beating high in her throat. "Please," she says. "Please just let her do this."

Fenris stares. Merrill has no need of magic to see his raw shock, the deeper disquiet beneath it—but when he says nothing Merrill knows it for the acquiescence it is, and a moment later she feels the white-cool thrum of healing magic twine through the air behind her. A minute passes; then two. Fenris does not look away; neither does he speak.

Eventually the magic dims, the room dimming with it. "There," Hawke says, softly and without malice. "Right as rain."

"You should not," he begins, his voice low and tight, but before he can finish Orana's voice comes hesitantly from the door.

"Mistress?"

Merrill can feel Hawke's weight shift behind her. "This isn't really a good time."

"I know," Orana says, her eyebrows creased with unhappiness. "I'm very sorry. It's only—Bodahn has gone out and I'm not certain but—I think Sandal might be about to blow up the cellar."

Hawke snorts, sighs. "I'm coming."

Fenris says nothing. Hawke goes to the door, to Orana—but as she passes him she pauses briefly to touch Fenris's shoulder and Merrill thinks: _oh_. She turns to the window swiftly—but it is still not enough to block out the sound of an embrace, of Fenris's shuddering breath, of the unsteadiness in his voice as he murmurs as if against his own will, "You make me weak."

"How curious," Hawke tells him, and even Merrill can hear the smile, "You make me strong."

And then the door clicks closed—and she is gone.

For several minutes, the room is very quiet. It is no hardship for Merrill to be still, sparrow before crows, sparrow in the teeth of the white wolf—but the sun is bright even through the drawn curtain, the room pleasantly cool, and when Fenris shows no inclination to either speak or devour her whole at her careful glance over her shoulder, Merrill satisfies herself with twitching dust motes through the slim sun-shafts that filter around the curtain's embroidered hems.

Fenris notices, after a while. He clenches his hands again too, and Merrill wonders briefly if his knuckles ever hurt with all that tension. Then, taut, uncertain, breaking the silence like a porcelain teacup, he says, "Why did Hawke come to you with this?"

 _Instead of me_ , Merrill hears. An unhappy truth, but she tells him: "Because she knew you would see her as something else than what she used to be."

Recoil—and a flash of surprise beneath the hurt. "That is—not true."

"Would you have been so concerned about a bruise before?"

"Could _you_ have gone through it unchanged?" Accusatory now, and defensive as he has ever been before her, and Merrill can find no satisfaction in it. So many shemlen thought it clever to tame a wild, fierce thing, to break his pride—Merrill sees only the wounded places left by their steel traps.

"Of course not," she tells him, kind as she dares to be. "But Hawke has changed too. She knows she can survive many things now that she could not have once. She's still learning what that means. She's afraid you'll—" Merrill spreads her hands before her, bare and plaintive, "hover so badly she can't find the sunlight around you."

"Speak plainly," grumbles Fenris, though they are both aware he understands. Merrill is not particularly knowledgeable of magisters, but they've never seemed the type to speak in a straight line if at all avoidable, and she knows Fenris once knew to take their meaning even when they talked in great silver circles.

She would speak plainly if she was sure what she meant to say. Regardless: "Sometimes you don't need to touch someone to break his mind."

"I have not been broken, witch." But no vitriol, no conviction—and he will not meet her eyes.

"Bruised, then," she offers, and when he glances to her face she moves closer by several steps, abruptly unafraid. "We've all been given different paths. It's just that yours is—very hard. I think it's even worse than Hawke's because it's so hard to see."

"I—am fine."

"You will be," Merrill agrees. "And probably sooner rather than later. You and Hawke are both terribly strong people when you put your minds to it. It's only…just don't forget to let the other person be strong when they like, too."

His ribs shift with a breath; then Fenris looks to the fallen quarterstaff on the carpet, to the place on the wall where Merrill's own staff leans. "You would have her harm herself in the name of recovery," he murmurs, though even she can hear his doubt.

"No," Merrill says. "Only to be given the choice."

Fenris looks at her, then, as if he has never seen her in his life before. It is a startled, wary, appraising thing, heavy on her shoulders—but it is neither angry nor afraid, and when at last his shoulders loosen, lowering from their high-hackled guard, Merrill thinks he might have understood her meaning. She moves closer as Hawke's footsteps pause at the open door, looking up to meet his eyes, emboldened by her own certainty. "Hawke isn't helpless," she says, and adds, cocking her head, "and, Fenris—neither are you."

"Merrill," he says; then his eyes flick to the doorway and he falls silent. Merrill turns—and smiles.

Hawke's mouth quirks up at the corner, but she says nothing of the left sleeve of her tunic snipped neatly at her elbow. Instead she crosses the room in brisk strides, throwing open the curtain and window alike in one motion, one-handed. Then she turns, hallowed, haloed in the sudden sunlight brimming over her shoulders, her sides, spilling down the neat fall of her hair retied by someone with two hands.

"I'm sorry I've kept you waiting," Hawke says to them both, meeting Fenris's eyes evenly, "but I'm ready now."

Fenris lifts his chin, something hard and glad in his face that Merrill cannot hope to name. "As am I."

"Then one more round before lunch."

"Yes," Fenris says, bending to retrieve the staff forgotten at his feet. Then, as if arrested by a thought, he turns to Merrill—sparrow pinned by the wolf's green gaze. But there is no anger in his face now, no unchecked wrath; instead he lifts an eyebrow and says, "If you wish—stay and eat."

Hawke makes a startled sound, but Merrill does not look back. This has cost Fenris enough to offer; she will not cheapen it by doubting him, not when he doubts himself enough already. Merrill only smiles and says without hesitating, "I'd love to."

He nods, enough of a thanks that Merrill's stomach does a little flip, and as he turns to Hawke and they begin again, more carefully, more _thoughtfully_ , to touch staff to staff, she sits at last in the biggest armchair beneath the window. Unneeded at the moment, perhaps, though she doesn't mind. She has been of use to them both. That is enough.

Fenris steps forward to meet Hawke as she raises her staff. A dance, Merrill remembers, with partners who know each other too well. A sweet breeze curls in through the open window behind her, and Merrill props her chin in her hand and dreams of aravels, their great red sails spread wide in the wind, sparrows flocking high and calling higher, guiding them through the wild and open fields and—home.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more after this one. Thanks, everyone, for sticking with me this long. :)

The problem, Isabela thinks, is not that she doesn't know herself. Isabela is aware she is many things: dextrous, clever with her fingers and with her tongue, beautiful, born for the sea. She is also aware of what she is _not_ , things like stalwart and honest and true. Loyal to a fault, that's another one. Dependable, even. Aveline has told her this often enough—frequently from the other side of a cell door, hands on her hips like some ruffled hen-mother scolding her chick for misbehavior. Not that Isabela needs a mother. Not that Isabela's had the best luck with mothers, anyway.

Not that she can't picture Aveline managing a little herd of redheaded children, all in little shining pieces of guardsman's armor, all frowning severely at whichever one first dared to toe the golden line of utmost honorability.

Isabela snorts at herself, tucking the image away to tell Varric later, and returns her attention to the effort of picking this _thrice-damned lock_. At last it clicks free—excellent security for a forgotten vault, even if it is directly beneath the Viscount's office—and she slips inside, soundless and grinning. The polished darkwood box lies atop a stack of crates in a corner; she pauses only a moment to verify its contents and then she is out again with it safely in her bag, a shadow on the wall and as unnoticed.

 _Ha_. See Aveline's little brood catch _that_.

No, Isabela decides as she saunters her way to Lowtown, bag thumping pleasantly against her hip, knowing herself is _certainly_ not her problem. Not the Hanged Man's problem either, the bar brighter than usual in the dimming dusk, some fool celebrating the night before his marriage and the crowd around him boisterous but cheerful. He looks young and rather red-cheeked for sobriety, and as she passes through the room she congratulates the lucky stiff with a wink. He startles, blushing, and Isabela grins—but she has other plans tonight, and even if she's never been entirely convinced of eternal love and devotion it never sits quite right with her to turn her charms on someone about to promise it. Poor sods.

Varric's door bursts open at her kick, and Varric himself looks up with pursed lips. "Again?" he asks. "I thought we talked about this, Rivaini."

"You talked. I didn't listen." He rolls his eyes and she grins, dropping her bag on the table with a thump. "Hawke here yet?"

"Right here," Hawke says, smiling as she enters from Varric's private room, her shirt's left sleeve hemmed to just above her elbow, two packs of cards held up in her other—only—hand. "Just getting the cards."

"Aren't you early for that? Nobody else will be here for ages."

"I need practice," Hawke says, quirking her lips, and Isabela doesn't understand until she watches Hawke sit at the table and slide the deck free of its case, and then, slowly, awkwardly, begin to shuffle them.

Varric quietly withdraws into his room and Isabela sinks down into the chair opposite Hawke, propping her chin in her hand to watch. Hawke pays her little attention, focused as she is on the slick waxed cards; to cut the deck is easy, even with one hand, but even with the blunted aid of her stump arm Hawke's attempt at shuffling them ends up with the deck scattered full across the table.

She sighs, gathers them up again. Tries again. A third time.

By the fourth spray of cards over Varric's table Hawke's jaw has tightened, the muscles in her throat stretching as she swallows back her obvious irritation. She splays her fingers over the scattered cards, the Knight of Mercy smirking up at them both between her fingers. "At this rate, Varric will never let me play here again," she mutters.

"Oh?"

"Because I'm about to set the whole room on fire."

"At least you've got the strength now. But if you stay here when you do that, I'm not coming back for you."

Hawke snorts. " _You_ don't have to stay, you know. I imagine watching me fumble through a perfectly simple shuffle must be agony. For you of all people, especially."

Isabela leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. Hawke's tone is easy enough for how irked she looks, but Isabela has spent too long at sea with too many short-tempered sailors to not recognize someone about to snap from frustration.

But Isabela, after all, is clever with her fingers.

"Here," she says, gathering up the cards, stacking them into a nice neat pile. She doesn't even palm the Angel of Death this time. "Let me show you some things I've picked up over the years." She turns the deck so that her thumb is along the short edge; then, one-handed, she splits the deck and shuffles it back into itself, two moves as quick as a serpent striking. When she is finished she does it again, more slowly, breaking up each step so that Hawke, who does not cheat at cards, might follow it clearly and without confusion.

Hawke chews the inside of her cheek, glances up to Isabela's face. Then, resignation's mask failing to hide her hope, she fetches the second deck and holds it in her hand, mimicking Isabela's fingers as they twist the cards against themselves. It is not the first or second or even the third time she tries, and it is not graceful, but eventually Hawke manages a thorough shuffle without a card spilled to the floor.

"Not so bad, is it?" Isabela says, watching Hawke watch her fingers.

"Could be worse," Hawke admits, barely recovering an awkward attempt at a one-handed cut. "It's the asking for help that keeps catching me up. I had no idea my pride was so fragile."

"Mm." Privately, Isabela does not agree—she has seen Hawke stripped of pride and health and all sense, lying in the wet sand of the Wounded Coast like refuse thrown back by the sea, white-faced and still as death. To see the same woman sitting across from her now, stronger, haler, color in her cheeks, making jokes, even as weak as they are—no, Isabela thinks. It is not Hawke's pride that is fragile. "I heard you went out to the Coast today."

The cards slip in Hawke's grasp and slide free all at once, a little fountain of grey-painted harlequins dancing across the table. "You heard that, did you?"

"You know how rumors spread, sweet thing."

Hawke lets out a huff of a laugh. "Kirkwall must be hard-up for grist if that's what the rumor mill's reporting. Nothing even _happened._ We killed some improbably-enormous spiders and a poorly-planned raider ambush. No one was even scratched. Besides the raiders, I guess."

"The apostate Champion goes out to kill things with sparkly magic after a month of convalescence? Oh, yes. That's worth talking about."

"Aveline told you about the hysterics, didn't she."

It's not a question. Isabela waves her hand in the air, dismissing both the accusation and the truth behind it. "A little crying, a little wild laughter, a little accidental fireball. Happens to the best of us."

"And the fact that I turned down seeing Beran in prison?"

"Not the choice _I_ would have made, sweet thing." She'd have driven her best little knife through his eye. She still wants to. Would, in a heartbeat, if she didn't know Hawke had already turned down the chance. "But I've never been wild about prisons."

"I thought I wanted revenge." Hawke looks down, splaying her fingers over the scattered grey-backed cards. "Right up until the point I found myself able to take it."

"Cold feet?"

"Cold everything. Fenris would have killed him. You would have killed him. I just—" She blinks rapidly. "I never met him in that cave, not once. He wasn't real. Not then, not now—he's a ghost. He's a spirit with shackles on and I _don't_ want to know his face or his height or the way his accent sounds in the trade tongue, because then he's—I don't know. He's _real._ He's a man who either has no conscience or chooses to ignore it. I know it's naïve of me, but—" She lifts one shoulder in an awkward shrug, not quite able to meet Isabela's look. "I'd rather believe for a little longer that this kind of evil doesn't live in most ordinary people."

Isabela closes her eyes, something hot and bitter swelling behind them. "I never did understand optimists."

Hawke purses her lips. "At least you're not trying to send me home over it."

"We can't all want to wrap you up in a little bubble and stick you in the cellar."

"Especially since the cellar opens to Darktown, anyway."

"Just another reason ships are better to live in. There are never enough hands on board to let a useful pair wallow belowdecks."

Hawke blinks, shock painting itself across her face, but Isabela does not apologize for her choice of words. After a moment, though, the sudden ache in Hawke's eyes begins to ease and she takes up her cards again, her fingers almost steady, practicing the rearrangement of a Wicked Grace hand without showing her cards to her hypothetical neighbor. Eventually she says, "Fenris was better about it than I expected, anyway. He didn't suggest once that I go back. Just helped me calm down and then we—moved on."

"And where is he, anyway? I've not had one single smoldering glare aimed at me in at _least_ three days, and I think I'm starting to miss it."

"Cleaning up. One of the spiders—mm. Exploded."

Isabela shudders, disgust unfeigned. "There is _no_ way to make that sexy."

"No," Hawke agrees, holding the fan of cards against her chest with her left forearm as she discards with her other hand. "But I appreciate the effort."

"Ugh, don't talk to me about effort. Every time I remember you two are still dithering about sleeping together I get itchy all over."

"Oh, thanks," Hawke says drily, but Isabela hears the softer note of a too-tender place beneath it, and she does not tease Hawke further. Clever fingers, clever tongue, no loyalty, no dependability—

 _Oh, shut up_ , she tells the Aveline in her head, and tugs her bag between them on the table. "Anyway, I got you a present."

"A present?" Hawke asks, genuinely startled as she lays down her hand, and Isabela pulls the wax-gleaming darkwood case free to lay it over the scattered cards. The case itself is unadorned save a single line of gold chasing around the seam, and as Isabela flips the catch and lifts the lid Hawke makes a queer sound, something caught between a laugh and a sob.

 _Good_ , Isabela thinks, resting her chin in her palms as she watches Hawke pull from the black velvet lining a shining silver pirate's hook.

" _Isabela_ ," Hawke gasps out, touching her fingers to the blunted tip, the elegant metal curve, the finely-worked engraving of vines in inlaid gold at the cuff. "Where— _why_ —how could you—"

"Kitten's idea. Though I left out the eyepatch. Hope you don't mind."

Hawke lets out a surprised, strangled laugh as she pulls the soft leather harness-straps from the bottom of the case. "I don't—mind, I suppose, but— _Isabela_. Of all the things in the world you could have picked—"

"I chose Hayward Bellamy's own pirate hook. I know. I'm wonderful."

"Hayward…?"

"Bellamy. Captain of the _Starfell_ at the first meeting of the Llomerryn pirate fleet that would later become the _Felicisima Armada._ " She sighs, letting a smile creep over her lips at the thought of so many resplendent, sleek ships all gathered in one place. Granted, those ships usually came with the standard glaring, scurvy-sickened, flea-bitten sailors as always, but still… "And a rather good lay, according to the tales, before he got his head chopped off for murder here four Viscounts ago."

"And he had a hook."

"And he had _this_ hook."

"And you acquired it…?"

"By the glorious, time-honored tradition of sneaking in and taking it right under their noses."

Hawke laughs. "Don't tell me that. It's so lovely. They'll arrest me if I wear it."

The noise Isabela makes is so derisive she can't even call it a scoff. "Hawke, no one has laid eyes on that antique in a hundred and fifty years. Nine-tenths of this city couldn't tell you who Hayward Bellamy was if you had the point of that hook to their throats, and if you don't wear it I'll cut my own hand off and use it myself."

"You would _not_ ," Hawke says, rolling her eyes. "With the fuss you make over wrinkles, you wouldn't let a knife within ten feet of that perfect body."

"Why not? It'd look just as good as yours, after."

Hawke flinches as if burnt, wincing, wounded—twice-broken nose crooked, skin scarred, hand gone. "That isn't funny."

"I wasn't joking."

Her mouth twists in an obvious effort to keep back her response, and Isabela is surprised to realize Hawke is near tears. But instead of wiping them back she looks away, down, sets down the hook and sets her jaw and swallows so hard that her chest heaves with the motion.

 _Blast_ , Isabela thinks, and wishes suddenly, viciously, that she had not been so kind to that Antivan collector. But that is not something she will speak of to Hawke, ever—not even to Varric, who was there—and instead Isabela grips her knees beneath the table and waits.

At last, Hawke says, "There's no need to coddle me."

"Have I ever been the type to coddle?"

"…No."

"Then quit pretending I've said something so shocking. I haven't even mentioned cocks all night in deference to your delicate sensibilities."

"Not that delicate," Hawke mutters, but Isabela can see the tremble in her mouth, the slender wet lines tracking down her cheeks, staining her skin with trails of light thrown by the candles strewn through Varric's suite.

No loyalty, no dependability— Isabela pushes up from the table in a decisive motion, circling round it without a word, coming to sit beside Hawke where the silver hook lies gleaming on the table before her, polished metal and polished wood and Hawke without her hand, all beautiful things to be so hard to the touch. But Isabela knows Hawke's pride is not the fragile thing, here; _that_ ship is strong enough, sound enough, wanting only the breath of wind from the right compass point to catch her sails and set her flying.

"Do you know what I think?" she asks at last, and Hawke shakes her head without speaking. "I think—speaking as a connoisseur of the carnal arts, as it were—that you are one of the most _magnetically_ attractive women I've ever met, and if I didn't think Fenris would de-heart me for the suggestion I'd offer to take you back to my room this very moment and show you exactly what that means."

Hawke laughs, watery but real, and drops her head to Isabela's shoulder. "You did say you were a giver."

Gingerly, Isabela reaches down, wraps her fingers around Hawke's damaged arm. She resists only a moment; then resistance gives way before the tide and Hawke lets Isabela raise her arm to her mouth, lets her press her lips against the straight ridged scar that lines the sudden end of it. "There," Isabela tells her, covering the stump with her other hand, no mother to a wounded child, no, never. "All better."

"Liar," Hawke says, one corner of her mouth lifting like the point of a broken blade.

"Never."

" _Cheater_ ," Hawke adds, twisting in her chair until she can give Isabela a full, real hug, her arms wrapping around her neck. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I still intend on taking every sovereign you've brought with you tonight."

"I'm all right with that," Hawke mumbles into her hair; then she straightens, wipes her face, blows out a short, steadying breath as she lifts the shining hook from Varric's broad table. "Flames. I should have worn Mother's necklace. This puts my wardrobe to shame."

"I can steal others if you want," Isabela offers. "I bet I could even get the hand off that terrible statue of you down the street. Ooh! Or we could have one _made._ They make all sorts. Dancing hands, grasping hands, hands with _fists_ —" she waggles her eyebrows, winking— "even one with one of Aveline's 'Don't' signs already mounted on it, if you're so inclined." She winks again, pleased with herself, and even as Hawke begins to laugh they hear the rising of voices in the hallway beyond them.

Aveline comes first into Varric's suite, stout ale in one hand and Isabela's rum in the other; Sebastian follows her into the hearth-lit warmth, his head turned over his shoulder to Merrill behind him, both of them talking over each other as Anders rolls his eyes at them both. He is relaxed, though, and smiles when Varric emerges from the back room to greet them, and as they all pile in around the table, laughing, teasing, all talking at once, Isabela sees Hawke lighten, anxiety and fear and shame falling away in one piece like a heavy cloak unclasped from her throat, no longer needed in the sun.

Fenris comes last. He, too, holds wine—Isabela would expect no less—but he sets it at the end of the table with the other bottles and comes to Hawke's side, unhesitating, unerring, his head bending to hers in unspoken question. Hawke nods, meeting his eyes, smiling with no trace of heaviness behind it, and Fenris smiles himself to see it.

 _Good,_ Isabela thinks again, satisfied, and turns her head. No need to snare herself in that open bare tenderness; no need to let that swift glancing strike to her heart linger a moment more than it must. Eternal love and devotion and—not for her.

But that, in the end, is her problem, isn't it? Isabela has always known herself: clever girl, clever fingers, pirate queen, as wild and fierce at heart as the sea. But here she is in a seedy little tavern in a twisted city despite all that, land-bound, heart-locked, surrounded on all sides by people who know her too well, who care for her more than her coin and count her more dependable than she has ever been regardless of Aveline's teasing, and _shit_ if she isn't starting to believe them. Only a port in the storm—only a short stopping place—

And still she lingers, ten years on, sea-changed and sailing a course by stars she doesn't know.

But it doesn't matter, she decides, watching Hawke model her new hook for Merrill, watching Aveline nudge Anders as Sebastian goes to the futile effort of erasing the cheat-marks from the cards, watching Varric watch the rest of them with warm fondness. Watching Fenris lean closer to Hawke, easy, quiet, unshadowed by self-consciousness or doubt. It is not _home_ , not exactly—Isabela is the sea's daughter and sick enough with longing to know this cannot last forever—but still—

Still. There are such things as homes away from home.

And as Hawke leans forward, calling for the deal, laughing as her family settles into their places around her, Isabela lifts a glass to her mouth and grins.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are at the end of another one. This time I know better than to say this is my last one for a while; in fact, I have another, already-completed (though shorter) story off at the beta even as I type this, because I will never be able to shake these two out of me. Still, I'm so glad you've stuck around to the end, and I hope it provides some satisfaction after all the suffering and angst that came before. :)
> 
> As always, thank you for reading.

It is unequivocally _not_ Orana's habit to listen at Hawke's doors. Once she would have without question: in her mistress's house in Minrathous, where a word caught here might mean a slave's life there, where she might keep herself small and silent and in shadow, unnoticed between marble statuettes and bright gilded robes. But Hawke wears no gilt and there are no marble statuettes besides, and as her years here have taught her not to fear so has she allowed that skill to lapse, to wither without notice or care beneath the warmer friendship Hawke had offered her in its place.

But now, passing by the open door to the main hall on her way to the kitchens, she finds herself arrested by a woman's low laugh and a murmured word—the laughter her mistress's, and the answer so deep it can only be Fenris. Orana swallows, feeling her cheeks color as she pauses just before the door, her fingers tightening on the ceramic vase she holds. She should not linger here. This is clearly private, clearly a moment that needs no intruder, only—

Only it has been so long since she has heard her mistress laugh.

As if on cue Hawke laughs again, and this time it accompanies the soft ringing of leather through a buckle. "How dextrous," her mistress murmurs, loud enough that Orana cannot miss the teasing note to her voice. "I should have you do all my buckles."

"Flattery does you little credit," Fenris tells her drily, and a second strip of leather shirrs into place.

"That's rather the point, isn't it? All credit to you, you lovely, talented elf with your lovely ten fingers. Do hurry, won't you? We were supposed to be there twenty minutes ago."

Fenris makes a short, pointed noise of indignation at both the compliments and the sentiment. "Had you taken more care the first time, the harness would not be so tangled now."

The harness— _oh_ , Orana realizes. For the mistress's hook. She has seen it, the complicated tangle of soft leather straps and little silver buckles meant to hold the elegant worked-metal hook in place. It had surprised her that something so beautifully simple required such _effort_ to be useful, to be made strong enough and secure enough to grasp and pull _,_ a full handful of leather bandings held in place beneath the mistress's—oh, Orana thinks again, and feels her cheeks heat a second time. If Fenris adjusts the harness—then the mistress is not, at the moment, wearing her shirt.

"But then you would miss all this," the mistress says, and the laugh she gives now is soft and throaty and without embarrassment. If Orana could trust herself to move without noise and without interruption, she would, but now—

"A loss indeed," Fenris says, his voice lower, and richer, and then Orana hears the smooth slide of hands on skin. Then a creak, as if weight has shifted on the low wooden bench, and a hushed breath, and the soft unmistakable sound of one mouth touching to another's. Hawke hums a note of approval.

Then suddenly, Fenris's whisper: a word in Arcanum Orana has never in her life expected to hear in that voice, in that tone. Orana closes her eyes, lifts the cool ceramic of the vase she holds to one flushing cheek, then to the other. She had not—had not known him capable of such endearments.

But the embrace does not last, and soon enough she hears the rustle of clothing and Hawke's chuckle, muffled in her shirt then drawing clear again as she returns herself to decency. Orana straightens, steps back a few paces and clears her throat, fanning her cheeks quickly, and this time when she reaches the open doorway she does not hesitate in the rounding of it.

"Mistress," she says pleasantly, crossing to place her vase on the long table across from the bench, and Hawke throws her a cheerful smile as she tucks her disheveled shirt into her trousers. Fenris nods without quite meeting her eyes, preoccupied with the silver hook that has turned a degree too far on the mistress's amputated arm, and with a careful twist he sets it straight again.

"There," he says, satisfied, and after a short inspection Hawke throws her gold-and-silver arm over his shoulder, taking pains to keep the hook's sharp edge clear as she pulls him to meet her. Fenris does not flinch at its weight, at the silver shining down its elegantly tapered curve. Neither does Hawke.

"What _would_ I do without you?" she asks him, grinning, and drops a peck on his lips before drawing away.

He catches her metal-bound wrist with his hand as it drops between them, enclosing it in as much a caress as Orana has ever seen him indulge in. "Go about with twisted straps forever."

"A tragedy indeed," Hawke agrees, and winks at Orana when she laughs. "Anyway, let's go. Varric's already going to tease us for the entire afternoon."

Fenris rolls his eyes, reaching for a small, clinking bag of sovereigns on the bench beside Hawke without loosing her hand. "Then hurrying will make little difference."

Hawke laughs again, bright and unweighted, and Fenris, just as easily—smiles at her. Orana looks down, blinks hard. She had forgotten he could smile like that.

She had not realized, until this moment, how very much she has missed it.

—

It is raining. _Has_ been raining all day, cool and grey and steady as little drumbeats marking out the hours. It is not so dark now as it was this morning, the early afternoon sun almost, _almost_ daring to pierce the clouds here and there, but even so Hawke cannot seem to mind the weather. She is too comfortable here with her hooked hand in her lap, leaning against Fenris's leg and the armchair he sits in as he reads in her study, the remnants of her current efforts scattered around her on the Orlesian carpet: jars with difficult lids laid open, strings and laces tied in clumsy knots, papers folded neatly and less neatly as her care gave way with her patience.

Her notes lie on the desk under the still-open window, placed neatly beside a pen and a fresh copy of Anders's manifesto. The top few papers have wrinkled with raindrops gone astray; at some point a half-idea of fetching both notes and manifesto while closing the window had fluttered through Hawke's mind, but the rain has made her lazy and Fenris's thigh is warm and firm under her cheek, and despite the dampened pages Hawke cannot muster the willingness to rise. Instead she stretches out her bare feet, crossing them at her trouser-clad ankles, and readjusts her back against the chair so that her weight is not so heavy on Fenris's knee.

He turns a page behind her head, lifts his glass of wine to his mouth: a gift from her to him, purchased to replace the bottle lost in the first moment of her magebane-driven weakness. The room falls quiet again save the soft, constant drizzling outside, and without meaning to, Hawke closes her eyes.

She dreams of Nys. She knows from the first that it is a dream and a shallow one besides, some deep distant part of her still aware of the sound of rain, of soft leather beneath her cheek—but that knowledge does not make the elf woman kneeling over her less real or less terrifying.

"I've found you," Nys murmurs, low and throaty, and slides her left palm across Hawke's cheek, a mockery of a caress. The golden half-moon emblazoned on the chest-guard of her armor is bright as glass, burning without heat.

Hawke—cannot move. "You're dead."

Nys laughs. "And you aren't?"

"No."

"I took your magic. I took your elf. I took _you_."

"None of those are lost to me." A truth she knows even as she says it—

The sudden breeze is shockingly cold in her face, heavy and damp with the promise of rain. Hawke fists her hands. Both hands—ten fingers, knuckles knotted white, thumbs pressed together in her lap, whole and without flaws.

Nys smiles. "Aren't they?"

" _No_ ," Hawke says again, and without straightening Nys looks behind her where the cave-mouth yawns, dark and too full of muted screams, thick with the smell of rot and blood, a flat unsanded table laid lit in its center like an altar. Hawke reaches out for it without knowing why—but there is no flesh on her outstretched hand: only bone, ash-charred white.

Her breath comes very thin in her nose, too weak to pass the lump of hot horror in her throat. "This isn't real."

"You think dreams don't matter?" Nys's hand moves further along her cheek and into her hair, and slowly the fingers begin to twist, tighten, snarl. "This part of your heart will be mine for the rest of your life. I _matter._ My son _matters_."

Hawke tries to pull back, tries to turn her head away, but Nys's grip is too tight and the water rising around her too thick to swim through, and she can only lift her chin and try to swallow air before it is gone. "I won't let you haunt me forever. I survived you. I _will_ survive you."

Nys drags Hawke up to meet her, face moon-bright, dark cropped hair glittering with rain, eyes maddened with flame. Behind her, the rough-wood table begins to burn. "The circle is closed, Champion."

She tries to speak, tries to shape for the third time the word _no_ , but the table is alight and Nys's eyes are afire and her hand is burning, burning, burning—

Hawke jerks awake.

She has made no sound, no startled cry; it is not until her eyes fly open that she feels Fenris shift against her, his warm palm coming to rest carefully on her shoulder, the back of her neck. "Hawke?"

_Oh_ , but she is sick of this.

Hawke reaches up, gripping his hand just for a moment, just to remind herself of what is true and what is not true—and then she pushes herself up on shaky legs, drives a swallow through the knot in her throat, forces herself across the room until she has her hand and hook alike flat on the desk beneath the still-open window. Her fingers tighten until the nails scrape into the grained wood, until the hook's curve dents its surface bluntly, gripping for more than sanity's sake as she drags down breaths of wet rain-thick air.

Fenris does not ask her if it is another nightmare. She knows he knows it is; he has witnessed too many of them the last month since their return, has held her through too many nights when she could not see through her glass-darkened memories. Instead his book closes, a quiet thump, and then feet as bare as hers pad softly across the carpet behind her. Hawke blinks, staring down at the top page of Anders's manifesto where it sits beside her silver hook, blindly finding a place where raindrops have smudged the ink to an illegible mess. _A sensible person should not be afraid of—_

But fear is so rarely sensible.

Her name comes again, low, measured as the tread of a booted heel, and when Fenris's fingers flit across the small of her back she shudders head to toe. Her shoulders are crooked like this where she is bent, her right higher than her left, and when Fenris's arms come around her it is a graceless fitting together of two unlike pieces, each too rough and sharp-cornered to meet without pain.

Ah, but Hawke knows pain, now, and understands better than she did that not all discomfort leads only to scars. Sometimes there is pain with growth, too.

Her hand fumbles its way around Fenris's at her waist; then her other arm comes up too, holding him against her as best she can, straightening until his temple comes to rest beside her own. How stupid that after all of this, that after _everything_ she has suffered she finds that she simply yearns to be _held_ , to be allowed to bend and diminish and rest solely on someone else's strength, just for a little while. She has held on for so long, longer than she ever thought she might need to—now, more than anything, she longs to be told to let go.

Fenris does not tell her so, not with words. But his arms are firm and his strength enough to hold her through more than just these nightmares, and when he does not pull away she finds herself yielding, little by little, folding back into his support every part of her held too-long stiff from fear and sorrow. He says nothing, taking all that she can bear and more, and when Hawke at last lets out a long, bone-emptying sigh he only pulls her closer to him, as if he understands, as if he knows what weight she has given him to carry and does not mind the burden.

_Hold on._ Her father's voice, and Fenris's voice, and Carver's voice. _Until it's over, sister._

It is time, she thinks, distant and clear as the Chantry bells chiming dawn, to let go.

"Thank you," she tells him when she can speak again; then she adds, her mouth twisting at the irony, "I'm sorry."

His voice rumbles gently down her spine. "There is no need to apologize."

"There never is, is there?"

Fenris lets out a soft laugh. "So it would seem."

"Mm." Hawke leans her head against his for a long minute, looking at the rain where it trembles down both sides of the paned glass. Then she murmurs, "We've never really talked about it, have we?"

"You—had no wish to discuss it."

Hawke laughs despite herself. "Somehow I feel like that should be the other way around," she tells him, but the humor dies as quickly as it comes, memory seeping up in spite of her efforts, a stone cistern too deep to fathom. "Fenris," she says, turning her head so that her mouth touches his cheek, tightening her hand on his. "I never asked. Are _you_ all right?"

Like this she can see the lines deepen at the corners of his mouth; like this she can see the shadow fall across his green eyes. Such a foolish question—and yet his voice is steady, unfaltering. "I expected to watch you die in front of me."

The shudder rolls through again, as much at the bleakness of the thought as the knowledge that she had expected the same thing. "I wanted to by the end," she admits. _Kill me_. "It was easier than being helpless."

He looks at her at that, but the question in his eyes has no answer she can give and she looks away. He starts to speak, checks himself, then says roughly, "Less helpless than I."

"You?" Hawke snorts, turning in Fenris's arms so that she can look him full in the face. "You're the only reason I'm still alive, Fenris."

"You would have found a way to escape."

"From a locked cell, when I couldn't stand, when I couldn't cast, half-mad with fever. Oh, yes, my chances were excellent."

"Had I not been there to be used against you—"

"I would have died," she says flatly. "You saved my life."

His lips press together. "And you mine. Without your word at the start—it would have been over quickly."

"So much for anyone owing anyone. It all washes out in the end."

"Hawke—"

" _Fenris_ ," she says, her hand clenching into his collar, impatient to hide her frustration, her _grief_ , "this isn't a—a child's game. We don't have to keep spinning round who saved whom or who owes the other more. It's not—" she makes a short, sharp gesture between them with her hook, struggling for words. "Love like this breaks that sort of circle."

It is not until his lips part, not until his eyes go wide that Hawke realizes precisely what she's said. The rain pattering on the sill is the only noise for a long moment, both of them staring at each other; then Hawke lets out a breath, straightens, meets his gaze levelly. She had not meant to say it like this, not yet, but—it is true enough. No reason to hide it, she tells herself in justification and reassurance both, and a lie to recant, and so rather than do either she lifts her chin and waits. Three years have gone by already; a minute more will make no difference now.

His mouth softens. His eyes soften too, and his whole frame bends towards her, just a little, and then his hands glide up the bones of her back and her shoulders to come to rest palms flat against her neck, thumbs to her jaw, fingers catching in her hair. His forehead bumps against hers, gently, and then he says so low the rain itself seems to hush to hear it, "Hawke. I am yours."

She kisses him. Twice, hard, neither graceful nor kind, and then she wraps both arms around his neck and pretends she is not trembling. Fenris catches her up, pulls her closer against him, his mouth in her hair and his heart thudding in his chest just as rough and quick as hers.

"Don't say that," she mumbles into his shoulder, half-laughing, half-choking on tears. "I'll die after all and _then_ what'll they say about suffering building character?"

Her hair flutters as Fenris's warm chuckle drifts across her ear; then he bends nearer so that his lips touch her cheek and he murmurs it again. And a third time, even more quietly, more tenderly: three words and three years' longing folded into each of them, touching the sore hidden places of her heart where even Anders's healing could not reach, a salve for each bruise left by regret and sorrow and too much wasted time.

They are wasting so much _time_ —

Her lips find his again. These kisses are more intent, more thorough; his mouth opens under hers and she laughs, pressing closer, stoking the coal-dim embers in her belly into something hotter. "Fenris," she says between kisses, his teeth dragging over her lower lip, "have you— _ah—_ do you have to be anywhere this afternoon?"

His hands still on her back, just for an instant. Then he says, "No, Hawke," and that is enough.

Contrary to Isabela's insinuations, there _had_ been a reason for waiting. Between the fever and the lingering injuries Hawke had at first been too weak, and then they both of them had been too angry beneath the hurt, and by the time the anger had been lanced it had seemed a coarse thing to force to happen. So they had waited, and said nothing, and now—but now they are _here_ —and Hawke has no intentions of letting another second slip by her without action.

"Do you," she asks against his mouth, hooking two fingers into his collar, feeling lyrium thrum wild and strong under her knuckles, "want to stay for a while?"

Fenris laughs again, dark and inviting, only the briefest catch of breath giving him away. He tells her, "Longer than that."

Hawke is not entirely sure how they make it upstairs. She remembers his hand in hers, his feet so close behind her own she nearly trips; she remembers wires of anxiety and desire alike twisting together in her stomach to leave her giddy. Somehow the door closes behind them, somehow the lock clicks—and then Fenris is there before her, smiling, in her bedroom, cool grey rain-shivered light from the window draping over him until his edges blur and his hair silvers and she can hardly believe this is real.

"Hawke," he murmurs, his fingers drawing up the lines of her throat—and _that_ is real enough to lodge her heart high behind her ribs where it races shallow and quick. His hands slide into her hair, displacing Orana's careful tie at the nape of her neck; the length of it falls black and loose around her shoulders, and Fenris pulls his fingers through it in a long, slow motion. She closes her eyes.

Then Fenris's mouth falls over hers, and Hawke does not think of her hair again.

She has missed him so much. Not just like this, pressed full against each other, his hands at the small of her back, her arms both flesh and metal around his neck—no, rather it is this easy confidence he shows so rarely that stops up her voice, that makes her stomach flip, the bare unhidden light in his eyes growing bolder as he strips away his own careful defenses, as he lets her pry back his armored walls. Her fingers drift down the muscles of his stomach, press there; he snatches a breath from her mouth, a deep, startled noise escaping him without warning, and Hawke laughs.

"Temptress," he says, his voice husky, and without warning his palms drag up her waist, snagging her shirt, hot even through the fabric and _maddeningly_ slow. He brushes his thumbs against the sides of her breasts and Hawke lets herself sigh, arching into the touch, wanting more and wanting at the same time not to rush this, not yet. It has taken long enough for them to reach this point together; she has little wish to lose the rest of it in a frenzy of untempered passion.

And Fenris understands, if the corner of his mouth curving up is any indication. He does not rush her; he does not rush _himself,_ and for several minutes there is no sound in the room save the rustle of cloth and his mouth on her mouth and rain on glass. Then—somehow—Hawke finds her back against her bedpost and Fenris's thigh between her legs, and—somehow—her fingers have made their way to the top clasp of his jerkin. He pulls back just enough to see her face, searching her eyes—but Hawke is not weak and Hawke is not _helpless_ , and she will see the Void in Thedas before she lets herself be defeated by a little piece of iron and steel.

The clasp to Fenris's shirt—a lock on a cell in a forgotten cave. No matter. No difference.

The clasp comes apart between her thumb and forefinger. Hawke grins, triumphant, and Fenris kisses her again; while her mouth is still open to his the second, third, and fourth toggles click open, baring his chest past his ribs, and Hawke does not hesitate before sliding her hand under the thick fabric, feeling the once-dead lyrium ridge and shiver at her touch, watching how Fenris's eyelids flicker as she drags her fingernails lightly down his naked chest.

_Oh,_ but she wishes she had two hands.

But one serves her well enough, or enough for this purpose, anyway—the last handful of clasps come free without catching, Fenris's shirt hanging open neck to navel, and when she pushes at it he helps shrug himself free until the thing falls to the floor without a second thought. Then he is on her again, in her arms, her hand and hook's curve alike roaming over the skin laid bare to her, testing with her fingertips and her blunted forearm the places where his firm muscles move beneath his skin, where the bones of his spine bend him so perfectly against her. His hands go to the hem of her shirt and she laughs at his sudden, awkward pause; he snorts at her and at himself, leaning away, and his whole back ripples under her hand as he pulls the shirt over her head.

Hawke straightens, letting her head fall back against the bedpost. Fenris has gone wholly still, her shirt dangling loosely in one hand, his eyes roaming from scar to scar to scar on her bared chest and stomach and shoulders between the leather straps of her hooked harness. He had seen her without her shirt before, briefly, when she'd tangled her harness straps, but then his focus had been on the leather and not on her—not like this. No breastband to hide her, here, now—Orana had been busy this morning and Hawke cannot fasten them one-handed—no shame but what onetime helplessness has brought her. As if in a daze, Fenris touches the pockmark at the base of her neck where the head of Nys's spear had driven through, the knot on her rib where Nys's mage had healed it crooked, the tough, bumpy patch on the inside of her right forearm where a Tide had once pressed a yellow-gold coal.

Hawke, beaten, broken; hawk pinioned, wing torn away to keep it from flying.

_Please,_ _Fenris. Don't pity me._

His hand lingers on the new-growing calluses on her shoulder where the leather harness for her cuff tightens. She waits and he runs his thumb over them, gently, and then without a word he bends and presses his mouth to her skin there. Hawke sucks in a breath despite herself and feels him smile, and when his teeth close delicately on her shoulder she cannot keep back the low, throaty moan that slips free. Fenris smiles again, moving to press his lips to the place where her neck meets her shoulder, and to the underside of her jaw, and to the skin beneath her ear.

She cups his cheek with her palm, holding him in place; then in as much a test of her own strength as of his she brings her other hand to meet it, her hook, the cool metal stark and silver against his cheek. He closes his eyes and she finds herself holding her breath, unsure, unable to stop herself now that she has started this between them—but Fenris's hand comes up, slow and deliberate, to press against her hook, holding its curve to the bone of his cheek, holding her against him as if she belongs there.

And then he opens his eyes and he looks at her, and the heat and the _want_ that burns in him unchecked, that he does not even try to hide from her—knocks the breath from her chest.

"Oh, _damn_ ," Hawke breathes, her left arm sliding tight around Fenris's neck to hold him close as she can get him. Her right hand grapples with the laces of his trousers, the knot suddenly too formidable for fingers that shake so badly as hers. She is gratified to find Fenris little more graceful as he tries to free her from her own ties, though his inelegance is due as much to her inability to keep her hips from rolling against his as his own too-eager hands. Still, her laces come loose at last—and before she can string two thoughts together his fingers have already slipped beneath her waistband, pushing down, incautious and _impatient_ until she stands in nothing but her smalls and strap-bound hook.

"Easy," Hawke says, laughing, gasping, the words fighting free between kisses. The carved wood of the bedpost is stiff under her spine, cool on the backs of her thighs even through the wire-wrapped scars that lace around them several times over. "There's no—rush. No reason to—oh, _shit_ , Fenris. Help me with this."

"With—?" he groans, fingers tensing on her hip between scar-ridges, clearly distracted by her teeth closing lightly around the tip of his ear, but Hawke yanks the trailing ends of the knot at his waist and he forces his eyes open again.

"Not that I couldn't do it eventually," she tells him, hardly knowing what she says, "but if you'd like to expedite the process…" Fenris manages some sort of response—but she is more focused on the strong slender fingers working between hers, avid and tearing at the knot as hers had been until the thing comes loose at last. She means to rid him of his trousers wholesale—but somehow his mouth catches hers instead, his tongue pressing on her bottom lip, and for some time Hawke forgets entirely the reason she'd been so irked by the knot to begin with.

Soon enough, though, the rhythmic press of his hips against her thigh reminds her, and the gold-sharp heat pooling insistently in the pit of her stomach reminds her, and before Hawke can muster another time-wasting thought she has hooked her fingers into his loosened waistband, taken two quick steps sideways, and yanked him down above her on the bed.

To his credit, surprise flashes over Fenris's face only an instant before he recovers himself. Bracing his hands on either side of her head—and she spares herself a flash of envy; no mimicry of that for _her_ unless she wishes to play the hunchback—he drags a knee to the rumpled bedspread between her thighs, sliding it upward—inward—

Hawke throws her head back into the coverlet with a thick laugh. "Maker, Fenris. If you leave again I may actually kill you."

He goes still at that, a momentary flash of pain in his eyes as sudden and startling as lightning on a clear day. Then he lowers himself to one elbow and puts his mouth to hers, slow and searching and without fear, and says, "That will not happen, Hawke. I swear it."

"What of Danarius?"

As soon as the question leaves her lips Hawke regrets it. Lust-stricken, love-addled _idiot._ To bring up that bastard here of all places, now of all _times—_

But Fenris does not hesitate, does not pull away, does not check his fingers from where they slide over the buckled leather straps at her shoulder, her collarbone, undoing them one by one. He does not hurry even when she whispers his name to urge him on, even when he slips the last strap loose, even when he lifts the cuff and hook free from the abrupt end of her forearm in one piece and drops both them and her undone harness to the floor. He holds her arm, meets her eyes, presses the ridged scar-seam that lines the end of it to the place on his chest where his heart thunders; then he says, quietly, "Nothing he could do would be worse than the thought of losing you again."

_Well_ , Hawke thinks, closing her eyes as if that might check the thunder of her heart, as if that might keep the lump-hard sob from her throat. "Good enough," she says, or means to say, but there is only room enough for a whisper between them, and when Fenris moves his mouth to her breast there is no space even for that.

They take their time after this. Rainfall still taps on the window-glass, lighter than before but no less steady; shadows of water on glass, thrown by what dim daylight seeps through the clouds, play over his skin and hers to dapple them both. Soft cool light shimmers through the lyrium that curls over Fenris's back, catching here and there in little iridescent gleams as he shifts above her, as she runs her fingers and her forearm over his skin, both of them careful, thorough, rediscovering the forgotten things and replacing the memories of the tortured places. He goes for the burns, the knife-cuts, the unstraightened bones; his body has fewer scars for her to cherish, but she makes do with the thin pale line above his eyebrow and the still-tender knot above his heart where his lyrium had been so savagely torn away.

He slides her smalls from her hips. She helps him from his trousers with hand and feet alike, shuddering, feeling him shudder against her. He helps her lean back against the pillows, kneeling between her legs; he bends to kiss her as she trails her hand down the jumping muscles of his stomach and lower, muffling his bitten oath in her mouth.

"Sorry," Hawke murmurs, laughter unchecked in her voice, "I'm only half as good with my hands as I used to be."

"Save those for Isabela," Fenris tells her tightly, brow creased, eyes closed—then she slowly twists her hand upward, and he says nothing at all.

After all this time, it is intoxicating to see Fenris like this: his lips parted, his hips working against her hand, his breath hot on her throat—his fingers shaking as they stroke her cheek, his voice thick and roughened and tender as he says her name. She does not stop her hand, even when he curls forward into her, even when he curses again into the hollow of her throat. For so long she had dreamed—and then she had _feared—_ and now she is drunk on intimacy, on love, on this heady secret glimpse of his heart. Lyrium-light flickers down his chin, his spine, the fierce-tensed muscles of his calves and heels and toes where they dig into her coverlet.

But her efforts can last only so long—and soon Fenris catches her wrist in his hand, dragging it away, dragging her hips up as he leans forward to meet her. "Hawke," he says again, a ragged plea—and when she rolls the rest of the way to join him he groans like a man struck some great blow. Hawke herself is little better. Despite her desire and her willingness it has been so long— _too_ long—and at first the ache is too great to be called pleasure, but as she arches her back his hand comes between them, cleverer than hers but just as eager, and in a matter of moments the pain begins to give way to something warmer, a certain rhythm matched, smooth, unselfish in the sharing of it.

"Just like this," Hawke whispers when they find it, her fingers along his jaw, his ear, his hand on her breast. Just like this—memory and this moment of one piece, unsevered—and it is _perfect._

He smiles, gentle enough her heart aches, and leans down so that his lips glance across her cheek. "Yours, Hawke," he tells her again, low and rumbling like a river undammed, turned true.

She wishes—but she kills that useless thought before it can take root. Instead she tests the difference between her right hand and her left, marveling at the sensation of lyrium sparking to life under the rub of her skin. Her fingertips are more sensitive than the scar-thickened flesh of her left arm, of course—and yet the change seems even greater than before, the tactile scrape of her fingernails across Fenris's shoulder so different—and no better, and no worse—than the sensation of her forearm dragging down his side, wrapping along his warm, muscle-firm back, broad and bold and so altered from before that what she once knew seems nothing but a dream painted with Fade.

Hawke finds herself content to leave it a dream. After all, her present reality improves on every piece of it.

Still, even like this, they do not hurry. The end will come regardless; like this Hawke feels no need to rush, no driving frantic pound of blood in her ears. Instead she is content to lie back in the pillows as Fenris leans over her, caging her with his arms, the both of them bound to this place and to each other by nothing more than choice. Fenris touches her cheek again, her temple. The red cloth band around his wrist brushes over her collarbone: a weightless shackle.

A _choice._ Just that. Nothing more.

In time, when she is close enough that her skin feels so tight she might burst, she reaches for him with both arms. There is no shame in the one shorter than the other, no hesitation in the baring of either of them, and Fenris's lips curve into a smile as he bends to her embrace, as she pulls herself up to meet him. She kisses the corner of that smile, grips his shoulder _hard_ to keep her magic checked—and then she is coming, her head tossed back, her eyes closed, nothing in the world but where Fenris holds her. He does not take long to follow after that; his hands tense on her waist and his back bows so that his forehead is pressed to her jaw, his lips against her throat, lyrium flashing stark-white and blinding up his spine, and though she cannot understand the language he speaks in so unsteadily, so fervently, she knows the meaning of it matches her own heart.

After, they lie together for a long time. Not long enough for the rain to stop—no chance of that, Hawke thinks, though she minds little now and less even than before—but long enough for their sweat to cool, for Fenris to pull free without pulling away, his legs tangled with hers, his forehead against her cheek, his arm heavy over her waist. They talk of nothing, lazy and quiet, long stretches of silence between them now and then and Hawke does not mind this, either, because they have _earned_ this peace together and they have known so little of it, lately, and to enjoy it now seems neither great sin nor great hardship. His fingertips ghost over her elbow, down her arm to the short stitch-scars and back again, tracing out a month and more of healing; she closes her eyes and feels how his chest moves when he is pleasantly tired, breathing in when he does, breathing out when he does.

"Should you rest?" he asks eventually, soft and steady as the rain on the window.

"Soon," she says, true enough; but because it is also true she says, "But not yet. A little longer."

He snorts; she smiles, rolling her eyes, and pushes herself higher on the pillows. Fenris grumbles without words at the motion, too sated, too weary for more, and when Hawke leans across him to fetch the thick, leather-bound book from her bedside table he lifts his head to let her. Somehow she doesn't make it quite upright again; somehow his head comes to rest on her naked stomach instead, heavy and comforting and tickling where his hair falls over her breast, his eyes half-lidded as she strokes her fingers through his hair.

The book lies at his shoulder where it landed, the arrow-pierced cover fallen open to bare the rose-embellished title page of a book of children's stories.

Fenris lifts his hand, touches his longest finger to the place where the leather juts inward, where her left palm had once been pinned. "You chose this?"

"I had to do something while I couldn't walk," she tells him. His head shifts so that his long pointed ear rests just beneath her heart; her fingers drift through his hair again, slow and tender and fond, the dear-won prerogative of a lover. "Would you like me to read to you?"

He laughs, a noiseless movement against her chest, and turns to the first page. "I enjoy listening to you."

"Flatterer," she says, lifting from the pillows just enough to press a kiss to his temple. He laughs again, turning his head so that he can look at her, and Hawke cannot check the quick upswelling surge of love that pricks the backs of her eyes.

Nys was wrong, she thinks, brushing a few strands of white hair from his green-rich gaze. There is no circle to be broken, not here, not like this. Everything she has been through with Nys and her Tides and the cave on the Coast no longer matters, not in the least, altogether unimportant save that it was the impetus for this moment to come to pass; every hour of suffering for her and Fenris both is only memory, only past, only gone. No circles, no hooks, no tears—only two little points of light, a straight unbroken line between them, beginning and ending in one whole.

And she _is_ whole, even handless. Even scarred. Bethany is gone, and her mother is gone, and Nys's son is gone—but though the world is lesser for their loss the scars will heal with time, growing smaller and less tender, until she can touch them and find no pain, only memories. More will die, she understands, men and women she knows and _will_ know and those that will be strangers to her, separated only by a sword and a choice—but she will grieve them when they part and not before, and she will not throw herself to the futile regret of those choices she can neither make nor change.

Someday, she will go back to the cave. There are bones there to be laid to rest; there is peace she must find for all that died in its dimming shadow. Someday.

But like this, here with Fenris, she has no missing pieces left to be filled. Her heart has fixed to his without regret, without repeal: a guiding lodestar in the darkest places, alight even when she cannot see her way.

She lets go.

"All right," Hawke murmurs, and Fenris pulls the book closer to them both so that she can see it more easily. He touches the arrow-scar once more, without speaking; then he finds her forearm where it rests on her hip and curls his fingers around it, his thumb stroking along the inside of her elbow, gently. The rain outside still falls unceasing, unconcerned, running in shining rivulets down the paned glass of her window; soft grey-touched light still fills the room, calming and quiet and without shadows. Somewhere a guard calls change of watch; somewhere Sebastian nods at Elthina and Anders bends over a sighing patient. Somewhere Varric and Isabela write together; somewhere Merrill laughs at a child splashing in the streets; somewhere Aveline looks up at her husband and smiles.

The world continues. They will move forward with it.

"Once upon a time," Hawke says, Fenris beside her, keeping vigil for her heart, and begins to read.

—

end.


End file.
